Commentaries

Access the latest opinions of the Honourable Jean E. Côté, Lately a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Alberta right here!

Quote of The Moment

Alderson B. once said to abusive cross-examining counsel “Mr. ______, you seem to think that the art of cross-examination is to examine crossly.” - Serjeant Ballantine, Experiences of a Barrister’s Life 105 (1882) Communis error sometimes creeps in not so much by positive doctrine or assertion as by mere assumption which is treated, and continues to be treated, as well founded only because it is not challenged. There are many principles of law which are regarded as so elementary that they need no demonstration by argument in court; but it sometimes happens that propositions which seem to be elementary, and thus grow into a communis error, are found, under criticism, to be disputable. - Allen, Sir Carleton Kemp, Law in the Making 332-3 (7th ed. O.U.P. 1964) Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder have a pattern of unstable and intense relationships. … They may idealize potential caregivers or lovers at the first or second meeting. … However, they may switch quickly from idealizing other people to devaluing them … These individuals are prone to sudden and dramatic shifts in their view of others, who may alternately be seen as beneficent supports or as cruelly punitive. Such shifts often reflect disillusionment with a caregiver whose nurturing qualities had been idealized … These individuals may suddenly change from the role of a needy supplicant for help to a righteous avenger of past mistreatment. … - American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders p. 707 (4th ed., text revision, 2000) I will do right to all manner of people after the law and usages of this Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. - English High Court Judge’s oath of office, ca. 1941 If all the good people were clever And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We think that it possibly could. But alas! It is seldom or never That the two hit it off as they should; For the good are so hard on the clever And the clever so rude to the good. Indeed the two last of the lines might perhaps have been adapted: For the Dons are so hard on the judges And the judges so rude to the Dons. - Serjeant Ballantine, Experiences of a Barrister’s Life 105 (1882) The late Mr. Theobald Mathew – clarum et venerabile nomen – with his inimitable gift of condensation, has summarized once and for all the functions of a Judge of first instance. He should be ‘quick, courteous and wrong.’ Wrong, because otherwise there would be nothing left for the Court of Appeal to do. I wish Mr. Mathew could have found time to embalm the functions of a Judge of the Court of Appeal in some equally compact formula. Do not let us, however, jump to the conclusion that a Lord Justice should be ‘quick, courteous and right.’ This would run counter to Mr. Mathew’s own principle since no work would then be left for the House of Lords. The Lords of Appeal in Ordinary must not lightly be defrauded of their statutory prey. - Sir Cyril Asquith, L.J., article in (1950) 1 J.S.P.T.L. (ns) 350 But once Counsel has fully deployed his material and his submissions, there is in my view far more to be gained than lost by the heckling which follows. No doubt it is irksome to Counsel: but a litigant with a strong case has everything to gain and nothing to lose by this process. In its absence, both sides would be left in ignorance of what is passing in the tribunal’s mind, and where what is so passing is fallacious, would be denied the opportunity of correcting it. - Sir Cyril Asquith, L.J., article in (1950) 1 J.S.P.T.L. (ns) 356 Nothing is more dangerous than to allow oneself liberty to construct for the parties contracts which they have not in terms made by importing implications which would appear to make the contract more business-like or more just. The implications to be made are to be no more than are ‘necessary’ for giving business efficacy to the transaction: and it appears to me that both as to existing facts or future facts a condition should not be implied unless the new state of facts makes the contract something different in kind from the contract in the original state of facts. - James Richard, Baron Atkin of Aberdovey, in Bell v. Lever Bros. (HL(E 1931) 101 LJKB 129, 159 It is suggested that the deceased must have been, or ought to have seen, the tramcar, and had no right to assume it would have been slowed down, or that its driver would have ascertained that there was no traffic with which it might come in contact before he proceeded to apply his power and cross the thoroughfare. But why not assume these things? It was the driver’s duty to do them all, and traffic in the streets would be impossible if the drivers of all the other vehicles will do what it is their duty to do ̶ namely, observe the rules regulating the traffic of the streets. - John, Baron Atkinson of Glenwilliam, in Toronto Ry. v. King (PC(Ont) 1908) 77 LJPC 77, 80 Nobody could have been as wonderful as Marshall Hall then looked. - Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, n.d. quoted by Sir Norman Birkett in his Six Great Advocates 12 (1961). Mr. Kenealy has ventured to suggest that the retainer of counsel in a case simply implies the exercise of his power of argument and eloquence. But counsel have far higher attributes, namely, the exercise of judgment and discretion on emergencies arising in the conduct of a cause … Few counsel, I hope, would accept a brief on the unworthy terms that he is simply to be the mouthpiece of his client. - Colin Blackburn J. (later Lord Blackburn of Killearn), in Strauss v. Francis (1866) LR 1 QB 379, 381 It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four. - Samuel Butler (Nov. 21, 1884 letter) …; and if juries do not prevent [libels] they may prove fatal to liberty, destroy Government and introduce anarchy; but tyranny is better than anarchy, and the worst Government better than none at all. - Camden L.C.J. (formerly Charles Pratt), in Entick v. Carrington (1765) 2 Wils KB 275, 292, 95 ER 807, 818 I have rarely heard a speech more precisely directed to the object under debate, more harmoniously attuned to the character of Committee discussion, than the excellent statement the Honourable and learned Gentleman has just made. It seemed to me that there could hardly be a more damaging speech from the point of view of the Attorney-General himself. Not only were his facts traversed, not only was his legal authority impugned and even controverted, but these sharp arrows were planted in his person by his distinguished legal successor in his old primacy on the Liberal benches. He has been able to answer him in fact and law and leave him a sprawling, and pitiable object. - Right Hon. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, M.P., in Hansard, June 17, 1930, quoted in Hyde, Norman Birkett 323 (1964) Gentlemen, I have said before, and I take the freedom to repeat, that it is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one. The moment juries or judges go beyond their functions, and take upon themselves to lay down the law or find the facts, not according to the law as it is, but according to the law as they think it ought to be, then the certainty of the law is at an end; there is nothing to rely upon; we are left to the infinite variety and uncertainty of human opinion; to caprice which may at any moment influence the best of us; to feelings and prejudices, perhaps excellent in themselves, but which may distort or disturb our judgment, and distract our minds from the single simple operation of ascertaining whether the facts proved bring the case within the law as we are bound to take it. - John Duke, Lord Coleridge, C.J., in R. v. Ramsay (1883) 48 LT 733, 735 None are so fond of secrets, as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets, as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation. - Colton, Rev. C.[aleb] C., Lacon or Many Things in Few Words (1820) at p. 36 He that abuses his own profession, will not patiently bear with any one else that does so. And this is one of our most subtile [sic] operations of self-love. For when we abuse our own profession, we tacitly except ourselves; but when another abuses it, we are far from being certain that this is the case. - Colton, Rev. C.[aleb] C., Lacon or Many Things in Few Words (1820) at p. 42 There are minds so habituated to intrigue and mystery in themselves, and so prone to expect it from others, that they will never accept of a plain reason for a plain fact, if it be possible to devise causes for it that are obscure, far fetched, and usually not worth the carriage. - Colton, Rev. C.[aleb] C., Lacon or Many Things in Few Words (1820) at p. 42 Always suspect a man who affects great softness of manner, an unruffled evenness of temper, and an enunciation studied, slow, and deliberate. These things are all unnatural, and bespeak a degree of mental discipline into which he that has no purposes of craft or design to answer, cannot submit to drill himself. The most successful knaves are usually of this description, as smooth as razors dipped in oil, and as sharp. ̶ They affect the innocence of the dove, which they have not, in order to hide the cunning of the serpent, which they have. - Colton, Rev. C.[aleb] C., Lacon or Many Things in Few Words (1820) at p. 81 Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it, no small deduction from the life of man. Cicero has termed them intercisiva tempora (cut up times), and the ancients were not ignorant of their value; nay, it was not unusual with them either to compose or to dictate, which under the operation of rubbing after the bath. - Colton, Rev. C.[aleb] C., Lacon or Many Things in Few Words (1820) at p. 204 … It was a serious contempt of court accompanied by unblushing lies on Woodall’s part; and the mere fact that no harm has been done in this particular case is neither here nor there. It would be unfortunate if the idea got abroad that if people threaten witnesses in this way, the worst that is likely to happen to them will be that they will have to pay some costs and make an apology. That is certainly not a course which I can adopt in this case. Nor do I think that the case is appropriate for a fine. This is a case in which I think it is my duty to make a committal order. … Weighing one thing with another, I propose to commit Woodall to prison for four weeks. - Sir Geoffrey Cross J., in Re J.A.B. [1965] 2 All ER 175 In England the idea of legal equality, or of the universal subjection of all classes to one law administered by the ordinary courts, has been pushed to the utmost limit … every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes, is under the same responsibility for every act done without legal justification as any other citizen. The Reports abound with cases in which officials have been brought before the courts, and made, in their personal capacity, liable to punishment, or to the payment of damages, for acts done in their official character but in excess of their lawful authority. A colonial governor, a secretary of state, a military officer, and all subordinates, though carrying out the commands of their official superiors, are as responsible for any act which the law does not authorize as is any private or unofficial person. - Albert Venn Dicey, Law of the Constitution p. 193-94 (9th ed. 1952) The ground of the application is stated to be public policy, which the Queen’s advocate seemed to think was of itself almost sufficient to induce the Court to grant the prayer. I cannot, however, hold to that view; it is necessary to show that the step proposed to be taken is comformable to law. Undoubtedly this Court, as all other Courts, is desirous to carry into effect the views of Her Majesty’s Government; nevertheless, it must not venture to go beyond the limits of legal authority. In a country governed by settled laws, it is necessary for Courts to be guided by those laws, and not by the will and desire of a Government. - Sir John Dodson J. in Re Late Emperor Napoleon Bonapart (1853) 2 Robb Ecc 606, 608-9, 163 ER 1429, 1430 It is the function of a court of law to give effect to the enactments of the legislature according to the force of the language which the legislature has finally chosen for the purpose of expressing its intention. Speculation as to what may have been passing in the minds of the members of the legislature is out of place, for the simple reason that it is only the corporate intention so expressed with which the court is concerned. Besides that road ̶ the road of speculation ̶ leads into a labyrinth where there is no guide. - Sir Lyman Poore Duff J., in Re Gray (1918) 57 SCR 150, 169, 42 DLR 1, 11 Arthur Miller, who sits on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, once observed that in many ways ‘[contemporary litigation is analogous to the] dance marathon contests. The object [of the exercise] is to get out on the dance floor, sort of hug your opponent, and move aimlessly and shiftlessly to the music with no objective in mind other than to outlast everybody else.’ That is precisely what happens in a great deal of civil litigation in our state and federal courts. - Christine Durham J. (Utah Supreme Court), “Taming the ‘Monster Case’: Management of Complex Litigation” (1986) 4 Law & Inequality 123, 124 Quote For The Moment … High-conflict personalities are in court because they are difficult, not because they have legitimate disputes. I believe that over the past ten years our courts have become a prime playing field for undiagnosed and untreated personality disorders. This is because the adversarial court process has a similar structure to their disorders … Purpose is deciding who is to blame; who is ‘guilty’ … Can hear or give testimony on past behavior of others … - Bill Eddy, High Conflict People in Legal Disputes p. 41 (Janis Pub., Calgary 2006) Zeal, n., a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) … [High-conflict personalities] are often effective at making innocent people look guilty, while at the same time with their desperate charm and aggressive drive they often succeed at looking innocent themselves. - Bill Eddy, High Conflict People in Legal Disputes p. 42 (Janis Pub., Calgary 2006) A more emotionally aggressive party (or attorney) may be more successful in capturing the attention and sympathies of the judge and jury … A more emotionally reasonable or passive party (many a true victim) can appear less persuasive … Ironically, … courts are more accurate when considering written information and documents only ̶ screening out visual and verbal peripheral distractions ... it appears that the Court of Appeals can often more accurately and objectively understand these cases, while trial courts seem to be more affected by peripheral persuasion. - Bill Eddy, High Conflict People in Legal Disputes p. 44 (Janis Pub., Calgary 2006) Gladstone “could convince most people of most things and himself of anything.” - William Edward Forster (quoted in Roberts, Andrew, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London 1999), at p. 364 Telephone, n., an invention which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) Locum sigillis, n., The place of the seal ... [which] words ... are humbly suggested as a suitable motto for the Pribyloff Islands ... - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) Self-evident, adj., Evident to oneself and to nobody else - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) Revolution, n. ... an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment, ... usually accompanied by a considerable effusion of blood, but ... accounted worth it--this appraisement being made by beneficiaries whose blood had not the mischance to be shed. - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) Resolute, adj., Obstinate in a course that we approve. - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) Ultimatum, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions. - Bierce, Ambrose (1906) The buyer has need of a hundred eyes, the seller of but one. - English proverb, mid-1600s. After the feast comes the reckoning. - English proverb, early 1600s. Who won't be ruled by the rudder must be ruled by the rock. - English proverb, mid-1600s. Where the river is deepest, it makes the least noise. - Italian proverb Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. - Winston Churchill, Hansard, 4 Nov. 1952 We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us. - Samuel Johnson, the Idler (1758) There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up unfashionable untruths than unfashionable truths. - Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950) It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it. - Jonathan Swift, The Examiner (1715) With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878) All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. - Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938) It is folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom. - Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies (1711) To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois. - Jules Renard, Journal (1889) Too much secrecy in our affairs and too little are equally indicative of a weak spirit. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) There are well turned-out follies, just as there are smartly-dressed fools. - Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et pensées (1805) The people should fight for their law as for their city wall. - Heraclitus, Fragments (ca. 500 B.C.) A fool always finds someone more foolish than he is to admire him. - Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, L'art poetique (1674) Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, provided they have satisfactorily filled out forms 3584-A through 3597-Q. - Dwight MacDonald, Against the American Grain (1963) When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. - Ethiopian proverb God sends meat, but the Devil sends cooks. - English proverb, ca. 1550 Keep one eye on the frying-pan, and one on the cat. - Italian proverb If there were no receivers, there would be no thieves. - English proverb, ca. 1390 Each of us at a handle of the basket. - Maori proverb When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own. - English proverb, ca. 1550 Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee. - St. Luke 19:22, The Holy Bible There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory. - Sir Francis Drake, 1587 despatch One seldom meets a lonely lie. - American proverb ca. 1950 ... the cold neutrality of an impartial judge - Edmund Burke, preface to Brissot's To His Constituents (1794) At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement. - Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac (1741) He that cannot obey cannot command. - English proverb ca. 1490 Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business. - Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625) Do not grudge to pick out treasures from an earthen pot. The worst speaks something good ... - George Herbert, the Church Porch (1633) This punishment is first, that no one guilty is acquitted when judged by himself. - Juvenal, Satires Be just before you are generous. - English proverb ca. 1750 Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations. - Seneca the Younger, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (ca. 50 A.D.) It is a sin peculiar to man to hate his victim. - Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Life of Agricola (98 A.D.) However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious, or impute crimes to it. - François La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1665) Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will or no. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, Moral Thoughts and Reflections (ca. 1690). There is nothing that so much gratifies an ill tongue as when it finds an angry heart. - Thomas Fuller, Introduction ad Prudentiam (1731) The wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections et Maximes (1746) It is a general error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. - Edmund Burke, “Observations on a Publication ...” (1769) It is an error to suppose that no man understands his own character. Most persons know even their failings very well, only they persist in giving them names different from those usually assigned by the rest of the world. - Sir Arthur Helps, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd (1835) What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order. - Antoine-Augustin Préault (ca. 1860) If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable. - Georges Courteline (Moinaux), La Philosophie de Georges Courteline (1917, rev. ed. 1922) Merit envies success, and success takes itself for merit. - Jean Rostand, De la vanité et quelques autres sujets (1925) The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. - Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (1931) When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. - Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (1955) Crafty men deal in generalizations. - Anonymous A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. - Matthew 13:57, The Holy Bible Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all. - Friedrich von Logau (1605-55), trans. by Longfellow A tall tree attracts the wind. - Chinese proverb The pitcher will go to the well once too often. - English proverb ca. 1350 Do not call a wolf to help you against the dogs. - Russian proverb He that would eat the fruit must climb the tree. - English proverb, ca. 1650 Genius without education is like silver in the mine. - American proverb, ca. 1750 Some folks speak from experience; others, from experience, don't speak. - American saying ca. 1950 Criticism can be avoided by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. - American saying, ca. 1950 Conscience gets a lot of credit that belongs to cold feet. - American saying, ca. 1950 As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave. - attrib. to Solomon ibn Gabirol (ben Judah), The Choice of Pearls (ca. 1050) Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of, like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art; and which human sottishness easily takes for current pay. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays (1580, rev. 1588) He is a fool that has nothing of philosophy in him, but not so much as he that has nothing else but philosophy in him. - Samuel Butler, Prose Observations (1660-80). Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them. - François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665) There never was a cause yet, right or wrong, that ever wanted an advocate to defend it. - Anonymous, Characters and Observations (ca. 1720, pub. 1930) It is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. - Samuel Johnson, the Rambler (1750-52) Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage. - Benjamin Disraeli, The Infernal Marriage (1834) If we consider that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked. - Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) A timid question will always receive a confident answer. - Baron Charles John Darling, Scintillae Juris (rev. ed. 1889) He who steals an egg will steal a camel. - Arabian maxim A wise man changes his mind, a fool never. - Spanish maxim It is dark at the foot of the lighthouse. - Japanese maxim He who can see three days ahead will be rich for three thousand years. - Japanese maxim Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the year. - Spanish maxim The cat would eat fish, but would not wet her feet. - English maxim, ca. 1210 Empty vessels make the most sound. - English maxim, ca. 1450. The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are bold as a lion. - The Holy Bible, Proverbs 28:1 And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. - The Holy Bible, Matthew 15:14 Facts are stubborn things. - English maxim, ca. 1710 Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. - Alexander Pope It is not enough for a gardener to love flowers; he must also hate weeds. - American maxim, ca. 1950. Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? - Matthew 7:3, The Holy Bible It will have blood, they say blood will have blood. - Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606) What a neighbor gets is not lost. - English maxim, ca. 1550 Keep no more cats than will catch mice. - English maxim, ca. 1690 Civility costs nothing. - English maxim, ca. 1710 The bread never falls but on its buttered side. - English maxim, ca. 1850 You never get it when you want it. - Murphy’s Second Law Knowledge and timber should not be much used until they are seasoned. - American maxim, ca. 1850 A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. - Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711) It will have blood, they say blood will have blood. - Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606) Health, that greatest of blessings, is what I never truly enjoyed until I saw Fair Canada. The change it has wrought, I am convinced, is truly wonderful. - Horatio Nelson (1782) I now mixed up some vermillion in melted grease, and inscribed, in large characters, on the South-East face of the rock on which we had slept last night, this brief memorial “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.” - Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1801) If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography. - W.L.M. King (1936) I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been. - Wayne Gretzky (1985) In 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company ... forming the largest corporate landlord in the world - more than 3 million square miles, from the American border to the Arctic Circle. Its Scottish president, George Simpson, governed ten times more territory than had the Roman emperors. - Arthur Herman (2001) What you learn from the study of history is that no one learned from the study of history. - James Bacque (2003) We also recalled what our parents taught us. Even if millions of people seemed to believe in an idea, it can still be a very dumb idea. For many people can be fooled some of the time, and others - some tenured academics in particular - all the time. - Reuven Brenner (2003) Any rational person would prefer actual health care to a right to health care. - Robert Martin (2003) The problem with Canada is that most story-tellers are not very good. - Jacques Godbout (2003) Someone once said that the greatest gift any human being can give to another is the gift of a good example. - Bill Sherk (2005) We'd rather have one hundred centres of mediocrity than one centre of excellence. - Margaret Wente (2005) You are a grain of mustard seed that shall rise and grow until its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the land. - Sieur de Maisonneuve (1642) ... the whole habitable earth and Canada. - Ambrose Bierce (1906) Since then a lot of ink has flowed under the bridge. - attributed to Jean Perron (ca. 1988) There are three types of meetings-boring, complete waste of time, and postponed. - George Torok (2000) Women have proved to be more honest, courageous, and hard-working, but this is no reason not to have more of them in government. - Eric Nicol (2003) The display of national confidence makes Canadians cringe. If we had to come up with a new motto, it would probably be “Canada. Not bad! / Le Canada. Pas mal!” - Margaret Wente (2004) The media are allergic to good news, and run from it as from holy water. - David Warren (2004) A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead, repairs its great public structures, and fosters national pride and love of country, by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past. - Joseph Howe (1871) Believe nothing that you see in the newspapers-they have done more to create dissatisfaction than all other agencies. If you see anything in them that you know is true, begin to doubt it at once. - Sir William Osler This memorial was erected to honour the memory of the men and women in this land throughout their generation who braved the wilderness, maintained the settlements, performed the common task without praise or glory and were the pioneers of political freedom and a system of responsible government which became the corner stone of the British Commonwealth of Nations. - Niagara Falls Pioneer Memorial Arch (1937, dismantled in 1968) We all have opinions, but some of us happen to be right. - Louis Dudek (1975) Before I came to Ottawa, I had a real job and I lived in the real world. - Allan Rock (2001) It is easier to write of the future if one is prepared to be a good sport about things, and predict a new and better world. Optimists are generally forgiven when they are proved wrong. People tend to be unforgiving of doomsayers, even when they are right. - Dalton Camp (2002) For some truly mysterious reason, our mind requires that there be order within apparent disorder. The search for order has been the central motivating force of human history. And it will continue to be so as long as humans are around. - Marcel Danesi (2002) In reality, what politicians say is totally uninteresting and unimportant: it’s what they do, and more to the point, fail to do. That’s what counts. - Peter C. Newman (2004) In reality, what politicians say is totally uninteresting and unimportant: it’s what they do, and more to the point, fail to do. That’s what counts. - Peter C. Newman (2004) Increasingly, we are becoming an oversensitive and sissified bunch who are reluctant to speak plainly ourselves and are even aghast at the sound of anyone else doing it in our presence. - Christie Blatchford (2004) It is the ship that stays afloat that gets to port. - Sir Samuel Cunard (185_) The Senate is the saucer into which we pour legislation to cool. - Sir John A. Macdonald (186__) Her population is about five million souls. Her Valley of the Saskatchewan alone, it has been scientifically computed, will support eight hundred millions. In losing the United States, Britain lost the smaller half of her American possessions; the Colony of the Maple Leaf is about as large as Europe. - William Lighthall (1889) "Rich by nature, poor by policy,” might be written over Canada’s door. - Goldwin Smith (1891) One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong. - Sir William Osler (1909) Canada is Scotland’s revenge. - Anonymous (193_) Fundamentally, my property is mine, my work is mine, and the fruits of my work, the result of the efforts of my brain and my industry ! that is mine and there is no other system of running society and there never will be ! none, none, none! - Stephen Leacock (1933) When I am in England I say to my English friends, “There is an honesty about the very seasons in Canada. In the winter it is cold. In the summer it is hot.” - Sir Arthur Beverly Baxter (1937) We need in Canada more of the spirit of the Englishman who, whenever he writes a letter to a civil servant, ends with: “You have the honour to be, Sir, my obedient servant.” - Sen. Eugene Forsey (1954) For your information, let me ask you a question. - Prof. Marshall McLuhan (1958) Well, it’s still a good place to live, but that's all Canada is now - just a good place to live. - Prof. Donald Creighton (1979) Most people think that “sin” is just an acronym for their social insurance number. - Betty Jane Wylie (1988) People need political and social leaders who can define policies, articulate problems, and express the aims and ideals of their society for those who cannot express them for themselves, though they may feel them very deeply. But the evidence is overwhelming that voters in a democracy want, and expect, bumble and burble from their leaders, and seem to be disturbed, if not upset, by the impact of articulate speech. - Prof. Northrop Frye (1984) Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you'll need an alibi. - Robert J. Sawyer (2002) In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. - John K. Galbraith (2003) Canada’s states are called provinces for a good reason: provincialism. - Bruce McCall (2004) Thus, the discipline is subject to faddism - anything could be true, nothing can be disproven. During the years, time and again [the discipline] has been held hostage by trendy new ideas that cannot be invalidated on the basis of scientific evidence but that must either be the objects of disbelief or sectarian enthusiasm. - Prof. Edward Shorter (2005) The wish was father ... to that thought. - 2 Henry IV (1597) The mill cannot grind with the water that is past. - proverb (ca. 1610) He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still. - Samuel Butler (1680) Dig the well before you are thirsty. - Japanese proverb When the axe came into the forest, the trees said “The handle is one of us!” - Russian proverb Power is like an egg; if you hold it too tightly, it breaks, and if you hold it too loosely it drops and breaks. - African proverb There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. - Oscar Wilde (1891) A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. - American proverb (ca. 1910) For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. - Jorge Santayana (1913) [George Bernard Shaw] hasn’t an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him. - Oscar Wilde (pub. 1949) A trouble shared is a trouble halved. - English proverb ca. 1950 Britain is no longer in the politics of the pendulum, but of the ratchet. - Margaret Thatcher (1977) It's the second mouse that gets the cheese. - Anonymous Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is Pride, the never-failing vice of fools. - Alexander Pope (1711) Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame. - Alexander Pope (1735) Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer. - Alexander Pope (1738) We never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves. - David Hume (1738) Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, ’til the whole circle be competed. - David Hume (1738) And having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them. - Edmund Burke (1795) Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. - Edmund Burke (1797) Little things affect little minds. - Benjamin Disraeli (1845) A precedent embalms a principle. - Benjamin Disraeli (1854) If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much ... Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son! - Rudyard Kipling (ca. 1895) The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and human. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. - H.L. Mencken (1955) [Canada] abounds in talent, out of all proportion to its population. The trouble is that its own people don’t recognize it ... and in my far from humble opinion they won't in your lifetime. - Gilbert Harding (1949) There are three levels of government but only one level of taxpayer. - Barney Danson (2003) Lies you must not tell, truths you don’t have to tell. - Yiddish saying Wisdom does not like chance. - Old English saying Cats which drive away mice are as good as those which catch them. - German saying He who denies his cat skimmed milk must give the mice cream. - Russian saying Too much wisdom does not produce courage. - Czechoslovakian saying He who would drive another over three dikes must climb over two himself. - Danish saying Everyone is wiser after the lawsuit is ended. - Slovakian saying He who goes to law holds a wolf by the ears. - Old English saying A good judge conceives quickly, judges slowly. - Old English saying When the herd reversed direction, the lame became its leaders. - Armenian saying If there were wisdom in beards, goats would be prophets. - Armenian saying Scalded cats dread cold water. - French saying With lies you can go far, but not back again. - Yiddish saying Worrying helps you some - it seems as if you were doing something when you’re worrying. - Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908) Canada improved in interest as we went West. - Winston Churchill (1929) The first thing man learned to recycle was words. - Hugh Arscott (2001) I began trying to persuade Canadians that they weren’t put on this earth merely to outlast cold winters. - Peter C. Newman (2004) Everybody’s business is nobody’s business. - English saying ca. 1610 The veriest nobodies in the world are the greatest busybodies. - Benjamin Whichcote (1703) When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Jonathan Swift (1711) Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties. - Samuel Johnson (1758) In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings! - Edgar Alan Poe (184_) The art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not taking up whatever happens to be occupying the larger public at the time. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1851) Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I’ll remember. Involve me and I’ll be changed forever. - Japanese saying The superior man is distressed by his want of ability. - Confucius (6th cent. B.C.) A good cause needs not to be patroned by passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute. - Thomas Browne (1642) We are more easily persuaded, in general, by the reasons we ourselves discover than by those which are given to us by others. - Blaise Pascal (1670) The effects of weakness are inconceivable, and more prodigious than those of the most violent passions. - Jean de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (167_) Applause abates diligence. - Samuel Johnson (1751) Greatness is usually the result of a natural equilibrium among opposite qualities. - Denis Diderot (1761) The tree of humanity forgets the labor of the silent gardeners who sheltered it from the cold, watered it in time of drought, shielded it against wild animals; but it preserves faithfully the names mercilessly cut into its bark. - Henrich Heine (1833) The years teach much which the days never know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1842) There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1890) Discussion. A method of confirming others in their errors. - Ambrose Bierce (1906) The man who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning. - Danish saying Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. - George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax (pub. 1750) The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. - Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1748) Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least. - Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1748) Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson (1819) There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. - William Hazlitt (182__) He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it. - Karl von Knebel (182__) I do not rule Russia; ten thousand clerks do. - Czar Nicholas I (184__) A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr (1858) (Glass in hand) Gentlemen, I give you Upper Canada. Why? Because I don’t want it. - Artemus Ward (1863) The various admirable movements in which I have been engaged have always developed among their members a large lunatic fringe. - Theodore Roosevelt (1913?) The real friend of [Canada] is the guy who believes in excellence, seeks for it, fights for it, defends it, and tries to produce it. - Morley Callaghan (195__) Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad. - Arnold Edinborough (1964) To the man who is afraid everything rustles. - Sophocles (4__ BC) What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to the knowledge of it without difficulty, and without any stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded. - David Hume (1739) The most absurd and the most rash hopes have sometimes been the cause of extraordinary success. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Time ought, above all other kinds of property, to be free from invasion; and yet there is no man who does not claim the power of wasting that time which is the right of others. - Samuel Johnson (1758) There are things one does not say for a long time, but, once they are said, one never stops repeating them. - Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1815) We must not indulge in unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain. - Walter Savage Landor (182__) The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain. - Ronald Firbank (1915) You should aim to be independent of any one vote, or any one fashion, of any one century. - Baltasar Gracian y Morales (1647) When men are easy in themselves, they let others remain so. - Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1711) When we feel that we lack whatever is needed to secure someone else's esteem, we are very close to hating him. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) A man does not mind being blamed for his faults, and being punished for them, and he patiently suffers much for them; but he becomes impatient if he is required to give them up. - Johann von Goethe (182__) Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble. - Sir Walter Scott (1823) How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right. - Robert Mallet (194__) I will grant no injunction merely upon priority of suit; ... I do not mean to make it a matter of an horse-race who shall be first at Westminster-hall. - Sir Francis Bacon (1617) Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences; for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws. - Sir Francis Bacon (1612) We often praise men for their weakness, and we blame them for their strength. - Marquis de Vauvanargues (1746) The weak praise themselves for their moderation, which is only laziness and vanity. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Those who propose to us merely paradoxes and imaginary contradictions are moral frauds. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The pull of a sole, often unfortunate, passion, sometimes holds all the others captive; and our enchained logic carries its irons without being able to burst them. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) A man who digests badly and is voracious; that is the picture of many personalities. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Having spirit is more needed by a negotiator than by the principal. The highest officers often receive the least talents. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Being asked, how he had the courage to stand up so boldly against Lord Mansfield, he answered, that he thought his little children were plucking his robe, and that he heard them saying, “Now, father, is the time to get us bread.” - about First Baron Erskine (178__) ... no man can be a great advocate who is no lawyer. The thing is impossible. - First Baron Erskine (1819) I always said, I will be my client’s advocate, not his agent. To hire himself to any particular course, is a position in which no member of the profession ought to place himself. - Chief Baron Pollock (1860) His means of producing conviction ... were plainness, conciseness, and accuracy ... rejection of all superfluous and irrelevant matter, and ... disdain[ing] all the mere devices of speech. Mr Webster said of him, that “his great mental characteristic is clearness; and the power of clear statement is the great power at the bar.” - B. R. Curtis (1879) “I like to be exact,” was the rejoinder. “(So-and-so),” he would say, “has a perfect genius for inaccuracy. He is always in the air.” Inaccuracy and being “in the air” were the things which Russell hated most. The things he loved best were accuracy, lucidity, brevity, and keeping to the point. So long as you kept those four things in mind, ... he listened to you with attention, and treated your arguments and views with respect. He was only intolerant of stupidity, folly, verbosity, and affectation. - about Baron Russell of Killowen (188__) The prophesies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1891) But the ideal style is a style that is clear, - that cannot be misunderstood; that is forcible, - that holds the attention; and that is elegant, - that is so exquisitely adapted to its purpose that you are conscious of its elegance only by subtilely feeling the wonderful ease of habitual mastery. - Barrett Wendell (1891) A wise editor will always make a point of inquiry for information, from one who knows, who is not necessarily a literary, scientific, or learned person. Good editing consists in knowing, not only who’s who, but who knows what. - Sir Edward Parry (1932) A good man struggling with adversity always makes an appeal to the judicial as well as to every other generous mind! - Baron Macmillan (1935) The picture cannot be painted if the significant and the insignificant are given equal prominence. One must know how to select. All these generalities are as easy as they are obvious, but alas! the application is an ordeal to try the souls of men. - Benjamin Cardozo (1931) Justice is not a cloistered virtue; she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men. - Lord Atkin (1936) No concrete case is before us. We have here an abstract controversy over the use of these words, and it is as sterile as abstract controversies usually are. - Robert Jackson J. (1945) ... A doctrine capable of being stated only in obscure and involved terms is open to reasonable suspicion of being either crude or erroneous. - Sir Frederick Pollock (1946) Writing a book is an adventure; to begin with it is a toy, then an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant, and the last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude you kill the monster and strew him about to the public. - Winston Churchill (1949) A half century ago a country youth, entering upon law studies with a rural practitioner had impressed upon him the maxim: “It is not so much in knowing the law as in knowing where to find the law.” - Bernard Ryan J. (1959) When you overstate, the reader will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement, as well as everything that follows it, will be suspect in his mind because he has lost confidence in your judgment or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy for the reader, the object of the writer’s enthusiasm. - William Strunk Jr. (1959) ...what would have happened if Lincoln, succumbing to the time pressures he was under, had asked [his gifted secretary] Hay to work up a first draft of something appropriate for the dedication of the new military cemetery in Pennsylvania. Good writing is a highly personal experience, and it does not come from tinkering with the product of someone else. The lawyer or judge who can write well but doesn’'t have the time to is lost to the cause of better legal communication. - Carl McGowan (1961) All important papers should be written by hand before they are dictated. Very likely the absence of the typewriter in the days when our nation's great state papers were prepared by our early brethren at the Bar may account for their excellence. - George Rossman (1962) This is by no means to say that all inside talk, all jargon, is pretentious and useless. On the contrary, most of it is highly necessary. Those in specialized fields have need to communicate with one another in precise terms and with an economy of expression. A single word will often convey to a colleague what would require a sentence, a paragraph, or perhaps an even longer description to convey to a layman. The fact that the layman does not comprehend the single word does not indict it for use within its proper sphere. - Theodore M. Bernstein (1965) ... certaintie is the mother of quietness and repose, and uncertaintie the cause of variance and contentions. - Sir Edward Coke (1628) Where the common law and a statute differ, the common law gives place to the statute; and an old statute gives place to a new one. - Sir William Blackstone (176__) My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try to make facts harmonise with my aspirations. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever nature leads, or you will learn nothing. - Thomas Huxley (18__) I cannot agree that the doctrines of this Court are to be changed with every succeeding Judge ... pain ... [if] done anything to justify the reproach that the equity of this court varies like the Chancellor’s foot. - Lord Eldon (1818) The difficulty of proving a fact will not justify conviction without proof. - John Marshall (182__) If justice requires the facts to be ascertained, the difficulty of doing so is no ground for refusing to try. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1881) ... there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn ... that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust ... in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers ... patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness. - Thomas Huxley (1897) Francis Bacon said that truth came out of error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion. ... If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating, and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, ... knock ... your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again. - Thomas Huxley (1897) No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical. - Thomas Huxley (1897) ... but remembering always that generosity is not a virtue when dealing with the property of others. - Robert Douglas (1898) Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none. - Benjamin Cardozo (1931) It is common knowledge that a camera can be so placed, and lights and shadows so adjusted, as to give a distorted picture of reality. - Benjamin Cardozo (1934) Most professional men have experienced the human phenomenon that in the estimation of their clients, the value of their services decreases at least in direct, and frequently in geometric, ratio to the length of time ... between the performance of the service and ... when remuneration therefor is sought. - George Wingate (1939) Courts are not like weathercocks, changing with every administrative wind that blows. They cannot on the same day rightly decide that the same statute means different things in different cases, merely because the Commission may on different days have had shifting impressions which it has not thought sufficiently important to express in any ruling, opinion, decision or order. - Harlan Stone (1941) The influence of lawless force directed toward parties or witnesses to proceedings during their pendency is so sinister and undermining of the process of adjudication itself that no court should regard it with indifference or shelter it from exposure and inquiry. - Robert Jackson (1943) One thinks that an error exposed is dead, but exposure amounts to nothing when people want to believe. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (pub. 1946) To decide issues of law on the size of the person who gets advantage or claims disadvantage is treacherous. - Robert Jackson (1947) Your lawyer in practice spends a considerable part of his life in doing distasteful things for disagreeable people who must be satisfied, against an impossible time limit and with hourly interruptions, from other disagreeable people who want to derail the train; and for his blood, sweat, and tears he receives in the end a few unkind words to the effect that it might have been done better, and a protest at the size of the fee. - William Prosser (1948). Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare to doubt what a legislative or electoral majority most passionately assert. - Robert Jackson (1950) In almost every law suit there is at least one party, generally the defendant, who is wholeheartedly in favor of the law's delays. - Arthur Vanderbilt (1955) For we write not only for this case and this day alone, but for this type of case. - William O. Douglas (1955) ...the assumption that everybody is either agreed about everything, or can be made to come to agreement by being shown the facts, is quite false. - John Donald Bruce Miller (1958). Much of the useful criticism of judicial decisions ... now comes from the law schools. I believe it would be of great value were their output to be supplemented ... by bar critiques bringing to bear the points of view of active practitioners ... - John M. Harlan (1963) Remember the lesson all lawyers have learned: To collect a just debt, from an honest but obstinate man is difficult; to collect from a crook is next to impossible. - Robert Kratovil (1964) The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman. There are few employments for hire in which the servant does not agree to suspend his constitutional rights of free speech as well as of idleness by the implied terms of his contract. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1892) When the ignorant are taught to doubt they do not know what they safely may believe. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (pub. 1913) If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith herein. - Robert Jackson (1943) I have doubts about resting public regulation upon any rule that is to be used or not depending on which side it favors. - Robert Jackson (1944) ... we should never underestimate the intelligence or overestimate the education of the American people. - William Muehl (1956) I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. ... The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion ... we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas. - Learned Hand (pub. 1960) For the future is like a corridor into which we can see only by the light coming from behind. - Edward Weyer (1961) The formal boundary between responsible self-government ... and tyranny or anarchy ... is often termed “the rule of law.” ... The rule of law is mocked and attacked, ... Educators and clergy urge us to break laws we do not like, and eager mobs implement their ideas with destructive violence; ... public officials blandly refuse to enforce the law if their political futures might suffer ... the most serious threat to the rule of law ... developed. Justices began to abandon the age-old principle of stare decisis upon which American and English law had been based for centuries ... The primary duty of the judge, after the facts of a case were determined, was to find the law applicable ... and decide accordingly, regardless of his personal feelings. On this system rested ... “a government of laws and not of men”. - Edward Cummerford (1968) For all laws (say they) be made and published only to the intent that by them every man should be put in remembrance of his duty. But the crafty and subtle interpretation of them (forasmuch as few can attain thereto) can put very few in that remembrance, whereas the simple, the plain and gross meaning of the laws is open to every man. - Thomas More (pub. 1551) The constitution does not allow reasons of state to influence our judgment. God forbid it should! We must not regard political consequences; how formidable soever they might be: if rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.” - First Earl of Mansfield (1770) The law is the best expositor of itself, that every part of an act is to be taken into view for the purpose of discovering the mind of the legislature, and that the details of one part may contain regulations restricting the extent of general expressions used in another part of the same act, are among those plain rules laid down by common sense for the exposition of statutes which have been uniformly acknowledged. - John Marshall (1804) There is a strong presumption that the literal meaning is the true one, especially as against a construction that is not interpretation, but perversion. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1917) Heraclitus said long ago, “Much knowledge does not teach wisdom.” - James Bryce (1921) ... there is no surer sign of a feeble and fumbling law than timidity in penetrating the form to the substance. - Learned Hand (1926) Life, not the parson, teaches conduct. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1926) Wherever the law draws a line there will be cases very near each other on opposite sides. The precise course of the line may be uncertain, but no one can come near it without knowing that he does so, if he thinks, and if he does so it is familiar to the criminal law to make him take the risk. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1930) Another mistake, ... is that a code is to be short. This probably springs from the thoroughly exploded notion that it is to make every man his own lawyer ... A code will not get rid of lawyers, and should be written for them much more than the laity. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (pub. 1936) ... it is a disastrous example of the results of the misapplied industry of the compilers of law reports. A decided case is only worthy of report if it decides some principle of law and it is only deserving of citation in a later case if the same principle of law is involved ... Unhappily ... the practice has arisen, in a case involving no principle of law but purely a question of fact, of saying: “Here is a report of another case rather like this, so please decide it in the same way.” - Frank Douglas Mackinnon (1940) The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice. - Robert Jackson (1949) ... But this is a case for applying the canon of construction of the wag who said, when the legislative history is doubtful, go to the statute. - Felix Frankfurter (1956) Stretch your arm no further than your sleeve will reach. - English saying ca. 1550 Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out: ... - Francis Bacon (1625) Goe not for every griefe to the Physitian, nor for every quarrell to the Lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot. - George Herbert (1640) Wherever a Knave is not punished, an honest Man is laugh’d at. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (1688) The strength of our persuasions is no evidence at all of their own rectitude: crooked things may be as stiff and inflexible as straight: and men may be as positive and peremptary in error as in truth. - John Locke (1690) ... the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words. - Samuel Johnson (1751) Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruled by too confident a security. - Edmund Burke (1790) [Public policy] is a very unruly horse, and when once you get astride it you never know where it will carry you. It may lead you from the sound law. It is never argued at all but when other points fail. - James Burrough (1824) The mental qualities of a leader, next to his moral qualities, are likewise of great importance. From an imaginative, extravagant, inexperienced mind, other things may be expected than from a cool and powerful intellect. - Karl von Clausewitz (1832) A conqueror is always a lover of peace (as Bonaparte constantly asserted of himself); he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed. In order to prevent this, we must choose war, and thus also make our preparations beforehand. - Karl von Clausewitz (1832) Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing. - Abraham Lincoln (1855) The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then. - George William, Baron Bramwell (1872) It is possible to forget a thing that did happen. It is not possible to remember a thing that never existed. - Samuel F. Miller (1873) ... There is nothing too absurd but what authority can be found for it. - Henry Manisty (1888) ... historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (190__) The great difficulty in the application of pure reason to practical affairs is that never in this world does the reasoner get all the premises which should affect the conclusion; so it frequently happens that the practical man who does not reason at all but who feels the effect of conditions which the reasoner overlooks, goes right, while the superior intelligence of the reasoning man goes wrong. College men ... are peculiarly liable to this danger ... - Elihu Root (1904) Presumptions ... may be looked on as the bats of the law, flitting in the twilight, but disappearing in the sunshine of actual facts. - Henry Lamm (1906) The notion that prohibition is any less prohibition when applied to things now thought evil I do not understand. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1918) There is no ground for the argument that the plaintiff was invited upon the tracks. Temptation is not always invitation. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1918) Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1921) ... none of us can claim to have been the originator of any very large portion of any science, be it legal or physical. It is all that can be expected if ... each ... succeeds in adding a few stones, or even one, to the ever-growing edifice ... [so] anything which one writes must largely be ... a restatement of what has already been said ... Each one of us may congratulate himself if he has added something of value, even if ... only in so rearranging the data ... as to throw new light upon the subject ... to illuminate the pathway of those come come after us ... - Walter Wheeler Cook (1923) Questions which merely lurk in the record, neither brought to the attention of the court nor ruled upon, are not to be considered as having been so decided as to constitute precedents. - George Sutherland (1925) Even an opinion, especially an opinion by an expert, may be found to be fraudulent if the grounds supporting it are so flimsy as to lead to the conclusion that there was no genuine belief back of it. - Benjamin Cardozo (1931) Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience. - Benjamin Cardozo (1935) It is not given to princes, statesmen, and captains to pierce the mysteries of the future, and even the most penetrating gaze reaches only conclusions which, however seemingly vindicated at a given moment, are inexorably effaced by time. One rule of conduct alone survives as a guide to men in their wanderings; fidelity to covenants, the honour of soldiers, and the hatred of causing human woe. - Winston Churchill (1938) ... much which seems impossible is possible, and ... most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared to be impossible, before they were done. ... - Louis Brandeis (193__) But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores. As a member of this Court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard. - Felix Frankfurter (1943) It is always embarrassing for a lower court to say whether ... to disregard decisions of a higher court, ... because they parallel others in which the higher court has expressed a contrary view ... Nor is it desirable for a lower court to ... anticipat[e] a doctrine which may be in the womb of time. Its duty is to divine ... what would be the event of an appeal in the case before it. - Learned Hand (1944) I have always been very much struck by the advantage enjoyed by people who lived at an earlier period ... they had the first opportunity of saying the right thing. Over and over ... [I thought] of something which I thought was worth saying, only to find that it had been already exploited, and very often spoiled, before I had an opportunity of saying it. - Winston Churchill (194__) It sat almost as a continuous constitutional convention which, without submitting its proposals to any ratification or rejection, could amend the basic law. - Robert Jackson (1941) The... reasoning adds up to this: The Commission must be sustained because of its accumulated experience in solving a problem with which it had never before been confronted! ...I give up. “The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.” - Robert Jackson (1947) If there is one thing that the people are entitled to expect from their lawmakers, it is rules of law that will enable individuals to tell whether they are married and, if so, to whom. - Robert Jackson (1948) [Some judges think] that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. [One must not] convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact. - Robert Jackson (1949) Everything has been said already; but as no one listens, we must always begin again. - Andre Gide (1949) “Consultation” is a vague and elastic term. - Winston Churchill (195__) ... men cannot enjoy their right to personal freedom if fanatical masses, whatever their mission, can strangle individual thoughts and invade personal privacy. - Robert Jackson (1950) I replied on the spur of the moment, with equal inaccuracy and good faith, ... heard the words ... from the lips of the President at ... Casablanca ... [later] found the facts ... [a] professor who, in his declining hours, was asked ... for his final counsel. He replied, “Verify your quotations.” - Winston Churchill (1950) I am not one of those who think that procedure is just folderol or noxious moss. - Felix Frankfurter (1951) The law is the only profession which records its mistakes carefully, exactly as they occurred, and yet does not identify them as mistakes ... - Elliott Dunlap Smith (1954) The Court's power [to declare legislation unconstitutional] was augmented by the existence of two independent logically exclusive, judicially created lines of precedent in every major area of constitutional interpretation. In a particular case, the Justices could go either way and fear no paucity of impressive authority. - Alpheus Mason (1956) [In a sculling competition] You don't win in the first ten strokes, or in the last ten You win in the body of the race. - a Yale coach (pub. 1958) It was impossible forever to glorify the underdog without in the end glorifying too much of what the underdog stood for, just as one could not incessantly disparage distinction without in the end destroying excellence. - Carleton Putnam (1961) Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on “team-work” is bunkum--a conspiracy of the mediocre majority. No advertisement, no commercial and no image can be created by a committee. - David Ogilvy (1963) The big public relations problems are actually a lot of little ones that got together to have a party. - Ohio Bar (1965) ... [university] admissions officers are groping in the dark, ... all the various admission criteria fail to provide sufficient help ... test scores, ... previous school experience, and school recommendations, ... interviews. ... [T]he range of ability within an admitted class is so narrow in statistical terms that accuracy of prediction for specific cases is very unlikely ... predicted grades are highly fallible, and not to be trusted as the sole criterion ... [W]hat evidence there is suggests little relationship between academic performance and subsequent success--even in academic pursuits! ... [P]rogress in admissions work will depend upon breakthroughs in ... personality evaluation. What appears to spell the difference ... are qualities of personality about which we know too little and ... cannot adequately measure ? motivation, persistence, independence, breadth of interests, ability to relate to others, sense of humor. ... - E. Alden Dunham (1966) An old error is always more popular than a new truth. - Old German saying To question and ask is a moment’s shame, but to question and not ask is a lifetime's shame. - Old Japanese saying Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. - Edmund Burke (179__) But whatever their services, revolutionaries obstruct the path to truth; the qualities which clear it are wholly inconsistent with theirs; scepticism, tolerance, discrimination, urbanity, some ? but not too much ? reserve towards change, insistence upon proportion, and, above all, humility before the vast unknown. - Learned Hand (1941) Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored. - Robert Jackson (1950) Our Constitution relies on our electorate's complete ideological freedom to nourish independent and responsible intelligence and preserve our democracy from that submissiveness, timidity and herd-mindedness of the masses which would foster a tyranny of mediocrity. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. - Robert Jackson (1950) ... habitual tardiness is the result of having prejudged an appointment and found it of such unimportance that punctuality is not essential. ... tardiness results from placing one situation in place of preference over another. The habitually tardy person has his excuse such as “he was tied up on the telephone” or “at the office,” etc. This in substance is the tendency to place more importance on one’s present activities than on one’s engagements which is prejudging the relative importance of one over the other. - Guy Fergason (1962) ... the catalytic effect of time as a factor in the legislative process. The same factor is important in the judicial process. A judicial decision which is founded simply on the impulse that “something should be done” or which looks no further than to the “justice” or “injustice” of a particular case is not likely to have lasting influence. ... Mr. Justice Holmes ... wrote ... “I hate justice, which means that I know if a man begins to talk about that, for one reason or another he is shirking thinking in legal terms.” - John Harlan (pub. 1963) He who is absent is always wrong. - English saying ca. 1450. As soon as we attract enough attention in the world to play a part in it, we are set rolling like a ball which will never again be at rest. - Price de Ligne (1796) No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. - Thomas Carlyle (1838) When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. - Eric Hoffer (1955) ... character is more than coolness, determination and unflinching courage when all seems lost. The moral quality of character is even more important, especially in an age which seemingly delights in questioning the existence of right and wrong. ... moral qualities play a part in government ... anyone with strong convictions about domestic and international public morality is at a great advantage in a crisis since his instinctive reactions are clear and immediate. Lacking such a background of moral conviction an individual can rely only on his intellectual agility, [and one worries about] the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry or emotionally affected. ... how far astray a man [even] brilliant and well intentioned ... can go who lacks a basic moral reference point. - Hugh L’Etang (1980) There is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes. - Anon. He who is absent is always in the wrong. - English saying ca. 1450 Lookers-on see most of the game. - English saying ca. 1520 A sense of one’s own dignity is as admirable when kept to oneself as it is ridiculous when displayed to others. - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1665) It is the fools and the knaves that make the wheels of the World turn. They are the World; those few who have sense or honesty sneak up and down single, but never go in herds. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (ca. 1685) We never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves. - David Hume (1739) When in doubt do nowt. - English saying ca. 1850 What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order. - Auguste Preault [n.d.] The gods send nuts to those who have no teeth. - English saying ca. 1910. Action is worry’s worst enemy. - American saying ca. 1950 It is easier to build two chimneys than to maintain one. - English saying (ca. 1550) The greatest of all secrets is knowing how to reduce the force of envy. - Jean de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1673-6) A clean conscience is a good pillow. - English saying (ca. 1720) Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1759) Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request. - Sir Arthur Helps (1841) Poke a bush, a snake comes out. - Japanese saying The art of being a parent consists of sleeping when the baby isn’t looking. - American saying ca. 1950 Example is better than precept. - English saying, ca. 1430 Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it. - René Descartes (1637) Good order is the foundation of all good things. - Edmund Burke (1790) You write with ease, to show your breeding. But easy writing’s vile hard reading. - Richard Sheridan (pub. 1819) Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. - Walter Bagehot (1858) No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force. - Helmut von Moltke (1880) A promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code. - Robert Service (1907) Punctuality is the art of guessing correctly how late the other party is going to be. - American saying (ca. 1950) Most people consider thrift a fine virtue in ancestors. - American saying (ca. 1950) The past is never dead. It’s not even past. - William Faulkner (1951) It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All map-makers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. - Saul Bellow (1969) Like a monkey scratching for the wrong fleas, every age assiduously seeks out in itself those vices which it does not in fact have, while ignoring the large, red, beady-eyed crawlers who scuttle around unimpeded. - Katharine Whitehorn (1970) Ill news hath wings, and with the wind doth go, Comfort’s a cripple and comes ever slow. - Michael Drayton (1603) All is grist that comes to the mill. - English saying ca. 1650. Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below. - John Dryden (1678) History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. - Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat. - Count Leo Tolstoy (1871) To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. - Oscar Wilde (1895) From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture. - Somerset Maugham (1930) You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. - Humbert Wolfe (1930) So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. - Aldous Huxley (1937) The man who works and is not bored is never old. - Pablo Casals (pub. 1985) Pessimism was dear to him in its impersonation of profundity and its implication of arcane knowledge. - Candia McWilliam (1994) The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose. - Sir Edward Coke (1604) No man is the wiser for his learning ... wit and wisdom are born with a man. - John Selden (1689) Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason. - Sir John Powell (1703) Where law ends, tyranny begins. - Sir William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1770) The Puritans hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. - Thomas Babington Macaulay (185_) Oh ... that mine adversary had written a book! - Job xxxi.25 Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied. - Romeo and Juliet ii.3 (159_) Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy - Romeo and Juliet iii.3. (159_) And with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds - John Milton (1667) Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle. - Edmund Burke (1790) O liberty! liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name! - Marie-Jeanne Manon Roland de la Platière (1793) Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. - Ezra Stiles (1794) Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein. - Proverbs 26:27 A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country and in his own house. - Matthew 13:57 Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggie” until you can find a rock. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) A fool and his money are soon elected. - William P. A. Rogers (192__) When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. - Japanese saying How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy. - James Fenimore Cooper (1826) I could never think well of a man’s intellectual or moral character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments. - Nathaniel Emmons (183__) Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. - Abraham Lincoln (1842) Most people can bear adversity, but if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. - Ralph Ingersoll (1883) A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. - Georg Lichtenberg (pub. 1889) People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. - Hermann Hesse (1919) Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. - Jorge Santayana (1923) Those who impartially report the arguments of opposing factions appear superior to all those sides, because they do not attach themselves to any faction. But ask them to choose, or that they themselves prove something, and you will see that they are just as indecisive or unable as all the others. The world swarms with philosophers who argue the vain glory of knowing the weaknesses of the human spirit. But few of them mark the precise limits of that weakness, and know how to draw results or lessons from it. They settle on vying with each other for the truth which is not their aim, and none of them give any useful advice. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. - Hosea 8:7, The Holy Bible Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. - Habbakuk 2:2, The Holy Bible The tree is known by his fruit. - Matthew 12:33, The Holy Bible Whatever vanity others criticize us for, we sometimes need to be assured of our merit, and need others to confirm our most obvious strengths. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) But, in the way of bargain, mark ye me, I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair. - Henry IV, Part I (ca. 1596) And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,, The instruments of darkness tell us truths;, Win us with honest trifles, to betray us, In deepest consequence. - Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606) Swinish gluttony Ne’er looks to heaven amidst his gorgeous feast, But with besotted base ingratitude Crams, and blasphemes his feeder. - John Milton (1634) When men get by pleasing and lose by serving, the choice is so easy that nobody can miss it. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (ca. 1690) How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens! - Joubert (1842) Princes had need, in tender matters and ticklish times, to beware what they say: especially in those short speeches, which fly abroad like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions. - Sir Francis Bacon (ca. 1600) It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them. - Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (ca. 1675) We see men fall from high estate on account of the very faults through which they attained it. - Jean de La Bruyère (1688) True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. - Alexander Pope (1711) He that advised thee not to let the sun set on thine anger did not command thee to trust a deceiving enemy the next morning. - Thomas Fuller (1731) Though men in great positions are easily flattered, we are still more easily flattered when in their company. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbors should be true to the public. - George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1750) Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have passed away. - William Cowper (178__) Ministers say what one wants them to say, so that one may do what they want one to do. - Victor Hugo (1820) He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it. - William Hazlitt (1823) The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct, betray his opinion of your character. - Sir Arthur Helps (1835) There is a way of asking us for our reasons that leads us not only to forget our best reasons but also to conceive a stubborn aversion to all reasons. This way of asking makes people very stupid and is a trick used by tyrannical people. - Friedrich Nietzsche (ca 1885) It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you. - Samuel Clemens (1897) In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people. - Mark Rutherford (1910) Small tyrants, threatened by big, sincerely believe they love Liberty. - Wysten Hugh Auden (1969) With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought. - Charles Churchill (1763) If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1763) More men become good through practice than by nature - Democritus of Abdera (ca. 400 B.C.) At the day of judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done. - Thomas à Kempis (ca. 1420) The best way to avoid a bad action is by doing a good one for there is no difficulty in the world like that of trying to do nothing. - John Clare (ca. 1830) To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1771) Not only do men tend to forget kindness and wrongs alike, but they even hate those who have done them kindnesses and give up hating those who have wronged them. The effort needed to reward goodness and take revenge upon evil seems to them a tyranny to which they are loth to submit. - La Rochefoucault (1665) Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (ca. 1780). The common excuse of those who bring misfortune on others is that they desire their good. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) It is not enough to be exceptionally mad, licentious and fanatical in order to win a great reputation; it is still necessary to arrive on the scene at the right time. - François Marie Arouet, “Voltaire” (1776) To commit murder is the mark of a moment, exceptional. To defend it is constant, and shows a more perverted conscience. - John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, first Baron Acton (ca. 1890) How many crimes are committed merely because their authors could not endure being wrong! - Albert Camus (1956) There are some faults which bear witness to a good character more clearly than some virtues. - Jean François de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (167__) No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance. - Jean de la Bruyère (1688) Who are next to knaves? Those that converse with them. - Alexander Pope (1727) Vice would not be altogether vice if it did not hate virtue. - Sébastien Chamfort (1805) Time is confirmed by inspection and delay, falsehood by haste and uncertainty. - Publius Cornelius Tacitus (AD 105) The traditional deadly sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Only greed has kept that popular status. Many voices now publicly excuse or advocate the rest, and advance a few as virtues. - Anon. We often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shamefaced passion we never dare acknowledge. - François de la Rochefoucauld (1665) Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which prudence and hypocrisy easily overleap. - William Hazlitt (1823) That which is base does not have the power to debase; honor alone can inflict dishonor. - François René, Viconte de Chateaubriand (1850) Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations. - Lucius Seneca (ca. 50 A.D.) There are some vices which only keep hold on us through other ones, and if we take the trunk away they come off like the branches. - Blaise Pascal (pub. 1670) The weak sometimes wish to be thought wicked, but the wicked wish to be thought virtuous. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The highest panegyric that private virtue can receive is the praise of servants. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1751?) Who can bear to see a fellow-creature suffering pain and poverty when he can order other fellow-creatures to relieve them? Is it in human nature that A should see B in tears and misery and not order C to assist him? - Sydney Smith (ca. 1820?) Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to seeing them wrong. There is often a good deal of spleen at the bottom of benevolence. - William Hazlitt (1823) It’s the imperfectly selfish souls that cause themselves and others so many heart-burnings. People who make half sacrifices for others always find that it’s the unfinished half that’s being looked at. - Hector Munro (“Saki”) (1924) Endurance is frequently a form of indecision. - Elizabeth Bibesco (1951) He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave. - George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1740) A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice. - Johann Goethe (1825) None are more apt to praise others extravagantly, than those who desire to be praised themselves. - Anonymous (ca. 1720) It is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (ca. 1751) Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving. - Samuel Coleridge (1817) Do you wish to find out a person’s weak points? Note the failings he has the quickest eye for in others. They may not be the very failings he is himself conscious of, but they will be their next-door neighbors. - Julius Hare (1827) We criticize Virtue severely for her faults, while we are full of indulgence for Vice. - Honoré de Balzac (1836) Haughty, silent faces should not deceive us: these are the timid ones. - Jules Renard (1887) Some for renown on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote. - Edward Young (ca. 1726) A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret. - Sir Henry Taylor (1836) There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech; but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press; - Samuel Clemens (1873) The best way to find out if a man has done something is to advise him to do it. He will not be able to resist boasting that he has done it without being advised. - Diane, Comtesse de Beausacq (pub. 1908) All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. - Cyril Connolly (1938) Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth’s: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence. - Aneurin Bevan (pub. 1962) Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world. - James Fenton (1985) Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of, like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art; and which human sottishness easily takes for current pay. - Michel de Montaigne (ca. 1585) You know these two nations are at war for a few acres of snow near Canada, and that they are spending on this fine war more than all of Canada is worth. - François Arouet (“Voltaire”) (1759) God does not support the big battalions, but supports those who aim the best. - François Arouet (“Voltaire”) (ca. 1745) When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun with nettles. - Horace Walpole (1779) It is not in human nature to deceive others, for any long time, without, in a measure, deceiving ourselves. - John Newman (ca. 1840) One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. - Samuel Clemens (1894) It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position. - Lev Bronstein (Trotsky) (1930) To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. - Evelyn Waugh (1951) I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts. - Orson Welles (1956) Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. - Joseph Heller (1961) What experience and history teach is this: that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. - Georg Hegel (1830) Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. - W. B. Yeats (1921) You can’t produce a baby in a month by getting nine women pregnant. - Warren Buffett (201_) Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. - Warren Buffett (201_) Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing. - Warren Buffett (201_) The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. - Warren Buffett (201_) Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you noting about the future. - Warren Buffett (201_) Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people. - Warren Buffett (201_) Wall Street makes its money on activity. You make your money on inactivity. - Warren Buffett (201_) If principles can become dated, they’re not principles. - Warren Buffett (201_) Nobody can remember more than seven of anything. - Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino A striking expression, with the aid of a small amount of truth, can surprise us into accepting a falsehood. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) He who does not know Truth at Sight is unworthy of Her Notice. - William Blake (1808?) Politeness is a false coin; to be niggardly with it shows a want of intelligence. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1851) Sir! You have disappointed us! We had intended you to be The next Prime Minister but three: The stocks were sold; the Press was squared; The Middle Class was quite prepared. But as it is! ... My language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales! - Hilaire Belloc (1907) For every time She shouted ‘Fire!’ They only answered ‘Little Liar!’ - Hilaire Belloc (1907) Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right! It is the business of the wealthy man To give employment to the artisan. - Hilaire Belloc (1911) For twenty years [Asquith] has held a season-ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself. - Leo Amery (1914) The most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a great discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it. - Marcel Proust (1922) The ordinary man only knows one kind of truth, in the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot imagine what a higher or a highest truth may be. Truth seems to him no more capable of comparative degrees than death; and he cannot join in the leap from the beautiful to the true. Perhaps you will think as I do that he is right in this. - Sigmund Freud (1933) I am a sundial, and I make a botch Of what is done much better by a watch. - Hilaire Belloc (1938) The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefitting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there is ... a necessary component of the expansionist case ... More will mean worse. - Kingsley Amis (1960) The cardinal virtue was no longer to love one’s country. It was to feel compassion for one’s fellow men and women. - Noel Annan (1990) The same principles which at first lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point bring men back to common sense. - George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1734) Many have original minds who do not think it ? they are led away by Custom. - John Keats (1818) He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many. - Jeremy Bentham (1840) You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave. - Sydney Smith (1840) Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong; [it is] a geographical concept. - Otto von Bismarck (1876) Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelations. - Thomas Szasz (1974) A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for: there is all the difference in the world. - Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1989) A quotation is what a speaker wants to say ? unlike a soundbite which is all that an interviewer allows you to say. - Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1996) C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. [It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.] - Antoine de la Meurthe (1804) Subtlety is not a proof of wisdom. Fools and even madmen are at times extraordinarily subtle. - Alexander Pushkin (182__) I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest. - Alexandre Dumas fils (188__) The rain, it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella: But chiefly on the just, because The unjust steals the just’s umbrella. - Charles, Baron Bowen (pub. 1923) Idiots have always been exploited, and this is only right. The day they cease to be, they will triumph, and the world will be lost. - Alfred Capus (1898) Everyone favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground. - Heywood Broun (1926) The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by means of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. - Justice Louis Brandeis (1928) The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. - Gen. Omar Bradley (1948) I could wish that the English [in Ireland] kept history in mind more, that the Irish kept it in mind less. - Elizabeth Bowen (1949) Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them. - François de la Rochefoucauld (1663) The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men. - Blaise Pascal (1670) The world is made up for the most part of fools and knaves, both irreconcilable foes to truth. - George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (ca. 1670) A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. - Jonathan Swift (1711) Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of readier change. - Alexander Pope (1727) When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke (1770) The metaphor is far more intelligent than its author, and this is the case with many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees something in everything. - Georg Lichtenberg (ca. 1770) Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. - Edmund Burke (1790) [The Jacobin] a steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country but his own. - George Canning (1821) Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. - Thomas Huxley (1880) To praise oneself is considered improper, immodest; to praise one’s own sect, one’s own philosophy, is considered the highest duty. - Leo Shestov (1905) Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when a man has only one idea. - Émile-Auguste Chartier (“Alain”) (1938) Violent men reel from one extremity to another. - Thomas Fuller (1642) If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone “Died of a Theory”. - Jefferson Davis (1865) The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. - Gilbert Chesterton (1905) Every public action, which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time. - Francis Cornford (1908) The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them. - Marcel Proust (1913) As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. Christopher Dawson (1942) The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. - Richard Dawkins (1986) I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker. - Robertson Davies (1990) There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies against despots : suspicion. - Demosthenes (ca. 330 B.C.) Fools out of favour grudge at knaves in place. - Daniel Defoe (1701) Some have wondered that disputes about opinions should so often end in personalities, but the fact is, that such disputes begin with personalities; for our opinions are a part of ourselves. Besides, after the first contradiction it is ourselves, and not the thing, we maintain. - Edward Fitzgerald (1852) What truly indicates excellent knowledge, is the habit of constant, sudden, and almost unconscious allusion, which implies familiarity, for it can arise from that alone. - Walter Bagehot (1879) The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults. - Peter DeVries (1954) How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? - Charles de Gaulle (1962) To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold an office. - Quintus Fabius Maximus (ca. 210 B.c.) Books we want to have young people read should not be recommended to them but praised in their presence. Afterwards they will find them themselves. - Georg Lichtenberg (178__) The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. - William Blake (1799) Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own. - Benjamin Disraeli (1877) A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. - Benjamin Disraeli (1878) You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. - Norman Douglas (1917) a man who is so dull> that he can learn only by personal experience> is too dull to learn> anything important by experience. - Don Marquis (1935) In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. - Dwight Eisenhower (1962) History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. - Abba Eban (1970) Better no law than law not enforced. - Danish and Italian sayings Pride breakfasted with Plenty, dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy. - English and Italian sayings. Pride and poverty are ill met, yet often dwell together. - English saying He who will have no judge but himself, condemns himself. - English saying He has a good judgement who relies not wholly on his own. - English saying Wrong judgment comes from inadequate defence. - Philippine saying To be a good judge, hear what everyone says. - Portuguese saying Justice, like oil, will come to the surface, however deeply you have sunk it. - Russian saying The first to speak of a lawsuit is not always right. - Wolof saying He who is judge between two friends will lose one of them. - St. Augustine (ca. 400 A.D.) He who refuses to submit to justice must not complain of oppression. - Ludwig Hölty (ca 1770) The liar is brother to the thief. - English Japanese Philippine and Welsh sayings If there is a lid that does not fit, there is another that does. - Japanese saying A liar can go around the world but can’t come back. - Polish and Russian sayings A liar is sooner caught than a cripple. - Italian and Spanish sayings To be a critic is easier than to be an author. - Yiddish saying A liar never believes anyone else. - Yiddish saying A liar tells his story so often he comes to believe it himself - Yiddish saying No one believes a liar even when he tells the truth. - Aesop (ca. 580 B.C.) A liar must have a good memory. - Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (ca. 70 A.D.) A lottery is a taxation Upon all the fools in creation And Heaven be praised It is easily rais’d, Credulity’s always in fashion. - Henry Fielding (1732) Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. Those harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave. - Herbert Fisher (1935) Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! - Edna Ferber (1939) The time is overdue for adding the separation of state and science to ... separation of state and church. Science is only one of the many instruments man has invented to cope with his surroundings. It is ... not infallible, and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own. - Paul Feyerabend (1975) Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. - Sir Francis Bacon (161_) That the vulgar express their thoughts clearly is far from true; and what perspicuity can be found among them proceeds not from the easiness of their language, but the shallowness of their thoughts. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1758) Without haste, but without rest. - Johann von Goethe (1796) The dream of reason produces monsters. - Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1799) This is wisdom’s final thought: Freedom alone he earns as well as life who day by day must conquer them anew. - Johann von Goethe (1832) Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds. - William Gladstone (1868) The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone. All centuries but this, and every country but his own. - William Gilbert (1885) A sheep in sheep’s clothing. - Edmund Gosse (pub. 1943) A language is a dialect that has an army and navy. - Max Weinrich (195__) Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered. - Wystan Auden (1963) Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union. - Sam Goldwyn (pub. 1976) A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right. - Stephen Gould (1977) One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. - Lady Jane Grey (pub. 1570) Choose an author as you chose a friend. - Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (167__) Young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be so. - attrib. to Dr. Metcalf (pub. 1678) Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts. - François Marie Arouet, “Voltaire” (1763) Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity. - Thomas Gray (1768) A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity. - George Grenville (1769) A dwarf sees farther than the giant when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on. - Samuel Coleridge (1812) Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT. - Charles Dickens (1855-57) To evoke posterity Is to weep on your own grave, Ventriloquizing for the unborn. - Robert Graves (1938) Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive. - Graham Greene (1948) They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered. - Graham Greene (1948) Science has lost its virgin purity, has become dogmatic instead of seeking for enlightenment and has gradually fallen into the hands of the traders. - Robert Graves (1969) I did not come to Washington to be loved, and I have not been disappointed. - Phil Gramm (pub. 1994) The childhood shows the man As morning shows the day. - John Milton (1671) A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. - Edmund Burke (1775) I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded. - Edmund Burke (1790) Early and provident fear is the mother of safety. - Edmund Burke (1792) Minds that have nothing to confer Find little to perceive. - William Wordsworth (1845) The art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not taking up whatever happens to be occupying the larger public at the time. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1851) An excellent precept for writers: have a clear idea of all the phrases and expressions you need, and you will find them. - Ximènés Doudan (1880) Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. - Philip Guedalla (1923) Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. - Cyril Connolly (1938) Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (pub. 1750) In corrupted governments the place is given for the sake of the man; in good ones the man is chosen for the sake of the place. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (pub. 1750) It is in a disorderly government as in a river, the lightest things swim at the top. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (pub. 1750) The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing. - Herodotus (ca. 435 B.C.) I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state, that the conquerors require not only a submission of men’s actions to them for the future, but also an approbation of all their actions past. - Thomas Hobbes (1651) The Poison of the Honey Bee Is the Artist’s Jealousy. - William Blake (ca. 1803) To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius. - Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1856) The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. - Gilbert Chesterton (1905) The minute a phrase becomes current it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1917) The importance of a scientific work can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes it superfluous to read. - David Hilbert (pub. 1993) He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack, For he knew, when he pleased, he could whistle them back. - Oliver Goldsmith (1774) The dog, to gain his private ends, Went mad, and bit the man. The man recover’d of the bite, The dog it was that died. - Oliver Goldsmith (1766) Who, born for the universe, narrow’d his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind: Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat, To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote. ... Though equal to all things, for all things unfit; Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit. - Oliver Goldsmith (1774) Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves - David Garrick (1758) The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. - Thomas Gray (1750) I strive to be brief, and I become obscure. - Quintus Horatius Flaccius (ca. 19 B.C.) Alteration though it be from worse to better hath in it inconveniences, and those weighty. - Richard Hooker (1593) It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1872) Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. - Elbert Hubbard (1914) For words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools. - Thomas Hobbes (1651) Equity is a roguish thing: for law we have a measure, know what to trust to; equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is equity. It is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be? One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot ... - John Selden (pub. 1689) No man is the wiser for his learning ... wit and wisdom are born with a man. - John Selden (pub. 1689) Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom. - William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1766) Avarice, the spur of industry is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small that it scarcely admits of calculation. - David Hume (1741-42) Money ... is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy. - David Hume (1741-42) The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions. - David Hume (1741-42) The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced. - Aldous Huxley (1937) In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. - Ralph W. Emerson (1841) How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings! - Edgar A. Poe (1844-49) Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it. - Gilbert K. Chesterton (1905) A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it. - Marcel Proust (1927)' But Titus said, with his uncommon sense, When the Exclusion Bill was in suspense: "I hear a lion in the lobby roar; Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door And keep him there, or shall we let him in To try if we can turn him out again?" - James Bramston (1729) Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. - Benjamin Franklin (ca. 1740) [Thoreau] was worse than provincial--he was parochial. - Henry James (1879) The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on earth. Stand back and you get the drift. - Bernard Ingham (1990) There are five causes which render wholesome discipline impossible: egoism, delusion, carelessness, illness, and idleness. - a Jain sutra (ca. 5__ B.C.) [Atlee] never used one syllable where none would do. - Douglas Jay (pub. 1996) Example is always more efficacious than precept. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1759) The great source of pleasure is variety. Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1779-81) By the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices ... must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1779-81) He that tries to recommend [Shakespeare] by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant ... who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1765) I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it is wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1765) [Milton was] an acrimonious and surly republican. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1779-81) The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1779-81) A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits. - Alexander Pope (1728) The vulgar boil, the learned roast an egg. - Alexander Pope (1737-38) The glorious uncertainty of [the law] is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it. - Charles Macklin (1759) No creature smarts so little as a fool. Destroy his fib, or sophistry - in vain! The creature’s at his dirty work again. - Alexander Pope (1735) The more contracted that power is, the more easily it is destroyed. A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1778) Calumnies are answered best with silence. - Ben Jonson (1606) [As a lawyer] you have a gift, sir, (thank your education), Will never let you want, while there are men, And malice, to breed causes. - Ben Jonson (1606) Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues. - Bishop Joseph Hall (1639) There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves. - Junius (1769) One man is as good as another until he has written a book. - Benjamin Jowett (pub. 1897) Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. - Carl Jung (pub. 1962) Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made. - Immanuel Kant (1784) Whoever wills the end, wills also (so far as reason decides his conduct) the means in his power which are indispensably necessary thereto. - Immanuel Kant (1785) The earliest poets and authors made fools wise. Modern authors try to make wise men fools. - Joseph Joubert (pub. 1842) Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance, and makes it always in order. - Henry James (1875) Sometimes an admirer spends more talent extolling a work than the author did in creating it. - Jean Rostand (1925) As someone pointed out recently, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation. - Jean Kerr (1957) One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time. - Robert Kennedy (1964) A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1754) Integrity without knowledge is weak, and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1759) You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1763) Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1763) Yet my great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way, and rowing another; and I got most of my estate by the same occupation. - John Bunyan (1678) Between craft and credulity, the voice of reason is stilted. - Edmund Burke (1777) The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements - success. - Edmund Burke (1791) In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Baron Lytton (1863) No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth. - Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban (1597) Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. - John Keynes (pub. 1947) For other nations, Utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon. - Henry Kissinger (197__) The multitude commend writers, as they do fencers, or wrestlers; who if they come in robustiously, and put for it, with a deal of violence, are received for the braver fellows. - Ben Jonson (1640) Tedious polemic writers are more severe to their reader than those they contend with. - Samuel Butler (ca. 1670) There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy the first notice of a prey. - Dr Samuel Johnsn (1750-52) People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. - Ralph Emerson (1841) Next to sound judgment, diamonds and pearls are the rarest things in the world. - Jean de la Bruyère (1688) Mediocrity is a hand-rail. - Charles-Louis, Baron de Montesquieu (ca. 1740) The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes; The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad. - Rudyard Kipling (1886) I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. - Rudyard Kipling (1902) How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz? - Rudyard Kipling (1910) Costs merely register competing attractions. - Frank Knight (1921) A writer’s ambition should be ... to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years. - Arthur Koestler (1951) How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read. - Karl Kraus (1909) If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. - Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1957) Two things are identical if one can be substituted for the other without affecting the truth. - Gottfried Leibniz (1704) [G.B. Shaw is] a good man fallen among Fabians. - Vladimir Ulynaov (Lenin) (1919) Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it. - Stephen Leacock (1924) If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. - David Lawrence (1936) Before undergoing a surgical operation arrange your temporal affairs. You may live. - Ambrose Bierce (1906) The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians. - William Inge (1948) There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. - Doris Lessing 1962) Whom the mad would destroy, they first make gods. [about Mao Tse Tung] - Bernard Levin (1967) A shortcut is often a wrong cut. - Danish saying An old error is always more popular than a new truth. - German saying Confidence is a plant of slow growth. - English saying Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. - American saying, ca. 1920 Crooked things may be as stiff and unflexible as straight; and men may be as positive in error as in truth. - John Locke (1690) There are very few lovers of truth, for truth-sake, even among those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know, whether he be so, in earnest, is worth enquiry; and I think, there is this one unerring mark of it, viz. the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant. - John Locke (1690) All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under the temptation to it. - John Locke (1690) The great peaks of honor we had forgotten - Duty, Patriotism, and - clad in glittering white - the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. - David Lloyd George (1914) The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by lunatics. - David Lloyd George (1933) We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our head, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. - Penelope Lively (1987) A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks fall. - English saying ca. 1380 Listen a thousand times, and speak once. - Turkish saying He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, ... for the mob is varied and inconstant ... - Benedict Spinoza (1677) The unexpected always happens. - English saying, ca. 1890. He who fails to plan, plans to fail. - English saying ca. 2000 Trees planted by the ancestors provide shade for their descendants. - Caecilius Statius (ca. 140 B.C.) Soon ripe, soon rotten - Latin saying Paper is patient. - German saying In the woods it rains twice. - German saying A ruler who is only good, loves his servants, his Ministers, his family and his favorite, is not at all devoted to his country. One must be a great ruler to love the people. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. - Thomas Macaulay, first Baron Macaulay (1843) The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is now. - 20th Cent. saying In 1969 I published a small book on Humility. It was a pioneering work which has not, to my knowledge, been superseded. - Francis Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1994) The day is for honest men, the night for thieves. - Euripides (ca. 412 B.C.) The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education. - Plutarch? Stupidity and pride grow on the same tree. - German saying Everybody’s business is nobody’s business. - English saying ca. 1620 The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it. - John Locke (1693) He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave. - George Berkeley (1750) To no man will we sell, or deny, or delay, right or justice. - Magna Carta (1215) For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of battle, the war was lost. For want of a war, the kingdom was lost. - French saying ca. 1480. The early man never borrows from the late man. - English saying ca. 1650 Don’t discard the old bucket ’til you see whether the new one holds water. - Swedish saying Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions. - James Mackintosh (1830) Flattery, like perfume, should be smelled, not swallowed. - American saying ca. 1850 [Niagara Falls is] fortissimo at last! - Gustav Mahler (pub. 1973) The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset. - Geoffrey Madan (1934) The Conservative Party always in time forgives those who were wrong. Indeed often, in time, they forgive those who were right. - Iain Macleod (1964) Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher. - Marshall McLuhan (1977) Astrology is a disease, not a science. - Moses ben Maimon (1166-68) When I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well-established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing 10,000 fools - I prefer to address myself to the man. - Moses ben Maimon (1186-90) The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. - Edward, Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1914) Men are always sincere. They change sincerities, that’s all. - Tristan Bernard (1922) How amazing it is that, in the midst of controversies on every conceivable subject, one should expect unanimity of opinion upon difficult legal questions! ... The history of scholarship is a record of disagreements ... we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty. - Charles Hughes C.J. (1936) Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less. - John Major (1993) Social or scientific, beliefs held by most educated people to be irrefutable, sometimes later prove entirely wrong. Many more are later quietly discarded and forgotten. Still more are heavily modified and narrowed, and so eventually transformed. - Anonymous Free dispute and debate do more than persuade or prove; they also shake out common but weak arguments, and so improve both sides of the debate. - Anonymous Whatever you think of your friend, he thinks the same of you. - Midrash Deuteronomy (ca. 150 A.D.) As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. - John Milton (1644) If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man ... And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers? - John Milton (1644) Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. - John Milton (1644) Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud. [Martial said that, but Pascal thought that worthless.] - Blaise Pascal (1670) The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak. - Blaise Pascal (1670) It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Those who make antitheses by forcing words are like those who make false windows for symmetry. Their rule is not to speak accurately, but to make apt figures of speech. - Blaise Pascal (1670) There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth. - Blaise Pascal (1670) How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but that a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger. - Blaise Pascal (1670) If the greatest philosopher in the world find himself upon a plank wider than actually necessary but hanging over a precipice, his imagination will prevail, though his reason convince him of his safety. Many cannot bear the thought without a cold sweat. ... The tone of voice affects the wisest, and changes the force of a discourse or a poem. Love or hate alters the sight of justice. ... How ludicrous is reason, blown with a breath in every direction! I should have to enumerate almost every action of men who scarce waver under her assaults. ... Our judges have known well this mystery. Their red robes, the ermine in which they wrap themselves like furry cats, the courts in which they administer justice ... and all such august apparel were necessary ... - Blaise Pascal (1670) When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered, [e.g. proving] the circulation of the blood [because] the vein swells below the ligature. - Blaise Pascal (1670) There is a ... difference between the actions of the will and all other actions. The will is one of the chief factors in belief, not that it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the direction from which we look at them. The will, which prefers one viewpoint to another, turns the mind away from considering the qualities of all that it does not like to see; and thus the mind ... stops to consider the view which it likes, and so judges by what it sees. - Blaise Pascal (1670) How difficult it is to submit anything to the judgment of another, without prejudicing his judgment by the manner in which we submit it! If we say “I think it is beautiful,” “I think it is obscure,” or the like, we either entice the imagination into that view, or irritate it to the contrary. It is better to say nothing, ... unless it be that silence also produces an effect, or as [the other] will guess it from gestures or countenance or from the tone of voice … - Blaise Pascal (1670) What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass. - William Lamb, 2d Viscount Melbourne (1829) The greatest gift of any statesman rests not in knowing what concessions to make, but recognizing when to make them. - Klemens Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg (1852) A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. - John Mill (1859) A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. - John Mill (1859) Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. - John Mill (1873) The word “freedom” means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word “order”. Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order. - Klemens Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg (pub. 1880) To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine. - Max Beerbohm (1895) The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. - Paul Valéry (1895) The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please answer my question, to the best of your ability. - Max Beerbohm (1911) Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. - Henry Mencken (1916) There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. - Calvin Coolidge (1919) Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise ... This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. - William Strunk Jr. (1919) War hath no fury like a non-combatant. - C. E. Montague (1922) Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. - Ford Ford (Hueffer) (1924) Owl hasn’t exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. - Alan Milne (1926) What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly to be sacrificed. - Benjamin Cardozo (1928) Nobody ever fergits where he buried a hatchet. - Frank Hubbard (Martin) (1930) ... I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] ... finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the paste-pot which are its implements and emblem. - Benjamin Cardozo (1931) As soon as the prince sets himself up above the law, he loses the king in the tyrant; he does to all intents and purpose unking himself. - Jonathan Mayhew (1750) I think a lie with a purpose is wan iv th’ worst kind an’ th' mos’ profitable. - Finley Dunne (1900) “D’ye think th’ colledges has much to do with th’ progress iv th’ wurruld?” asked Mr Hennessy. “D’ye think,” said Mr Dooley, “’tis th’ mill that makes th’ wather run?” - Finley Dunne (1900) A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels be an illiction is called a rayformer an’ remains at large. - Finley Dunne (1900) Homer is new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, is as old and tired as today’s newspaper. - Charles Peguuy (1914) Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind. - Somerset Maugham (1915) Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. - E. Arnold Bennett (1918) The price of justice is eternal publicity. - E. Arnold Bennett (1923) How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about. - John Galsworthy (1933) boss there is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble. - Don Marquis (1935) Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. - Winston Churchill (1936) No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated. - Ellen Glasgow (1936) Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it’s the only one we have. - Émile Chartier (Alain) (1936) ... a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes no court need save; ... in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish. - Learned Hand (1942) That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. - Learned Hand (1952) Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all over the place haphazardly. - Herbert Wells (pub. 1973) Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind. - Thomas Bastard (1598) Belief in progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work. - Charles Baudelaire (1887) All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. - Henry Mencken (1919) An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. - Karl Kraus (19__) No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. - Henry Mencken (1926) The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There’s far less competition. - Dwight Morrow (pub. 1935) Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all. - Winston Churchill (193__) When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. - Henry Mencken (1941) Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing. - Bernard Baruch (1960) The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted. - John Mortimer (1982) He disdains all things above his reach, and preferreth all countries before his own. - Thomas Overbury (pub. 1632) Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves. It is like a nation which we have provoked, but meet again after two generations. They are still Frenchmen, but not the same [ones]. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Contraries -- Man is naturally credulous and incredulous, timid and rash. - Blaise Pascal (1670) We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Pursuits -- The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death. - Blaise Pascal (1670) A prince who gets a reputation for good nature in the first year of his reign, is laughed at in the second. - Napoleon Bonaparte (1807) Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. - St. John Newman (1864) Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority. - José Ortega y Gasset (1911) Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within. - José Ortega y Gasset (1927) Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. - John Keynes (1931) Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. - John Keynes (1936) Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. - Eric Blair (George Orwell) (1940) Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. - Reinhold Niebuhr (1944) The press is a sort of wild animal in our midst -- restless, gigantic, always seeking new ways to use its strength ... The sovereign press for the most part acknowledges accountability to no one except its owners and publishers. - Zechariah Chafee (1948) The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man. - José Ortega y Gasset (1948) Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. - Eric Blair (George Orwell) (1949) Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. - Eric Blair (George Orwell) (1949) No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices. - Ed Murrow (1954) The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. - Northcote Parkinson (1958) We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. - Otto Neurath (1959) Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix. - Harry Truman (pub. 1974) He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain. Indeed who do not see it but youths who are absorbed in fame, diversion, and the thought of the future. ... for it is indeed to be unhappy to be in insufferable sadness as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Cromwell was about to ravage all Christendom; the royal family was undone, and his own for ever established, save for a little grain of sand which formed in his ureter. Rome herself was trembling under him; but this small piece of gravel having formed there, he is dead, his family cast down, all is peaceful, and the king is restored. - Blaise Pascal (1670) We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it. - Blaise Pascal (1670) The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - Howard Lovecraft (1928) Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights on while looking out the back window. - Peter Drucker (19___) Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. - Peter Drucker (1967) Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. - Peter Drucker (19___) There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. - Peter Drucker (19___) The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. - Peter Drucker (19___) The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. - Peter Drucker (19___) Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. - Peter Drucker (19___) Do not limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time. - ancient Hebrew saying When a well-educated young man first enters society he is liable to commit many errors which the world terms childish, simply because he has not yet learned how childish grown men really are. - Giacomo Leopardi (1834-37) It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do is jealously to preserve the text. - Robert Stevenson (1881) Many a man that cudden’t direct ye to th’ drug store on th’ corner whin he was thirty will get a rispictful hearing whin age has further impaired his mind. - Finley Dunne (1919) The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to rule a state? ... but because men are so [unruly and unjust] themselves, and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just. For whom will men choose, as the most virtuous and able? We at once come to blows, as each claims to be the most virtuous and able. Let us then attach this quality to something indisputable. This is the king’s eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Injustice -- It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it is necessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. - Blaise Pascal (1670) The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance [of] birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back to that same ignorance ... but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge, and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world, and are bad judges of everything. - Blaise Pascal (1670) In childhood life is like a theatrical décor seen from a distance, in old age it looks like the same décor seen at very close quarters. - Arthur Schopenhauer (1851) To grow mature is to separate more distinctly, to connect more closely. - Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1922) An ape’s an ape, a varlet’s a varlet, though they be clad in silk or scarlet. - Greek saying (ca. A.D. 150) A guilty conscience needs no accuser. - Latin saying ca. 1200) A bad workman blames his tools. - French saying (ca. 1290) Party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few. - Alexander Pope (1714) To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor. - Alexander Pope (1717) It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out. - Alexander Pope (1727) Shakespeare (whom you and ev’ry play-house bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite. - Alexander Pope (1737) The eye of a master does more work than both his hands. - English saying (ca. 1750) Better a good cow than a cow of a good kind. - British saying (ca. 1910) The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. - Lewis Mumford (1934) We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name of Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek [for] steersman. - Norbert Wiener (1948) The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - Lesley Hartley (1953) Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes--so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil--nothing so self-blinding. - Basil Liddell Hart (1960) The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. - Norbert Wiener (1964) We tended to imagine Canada as a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States. - Edmund Wilson (1965) Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. - Richard Fuller (1969) I’m the only guinea pig I have. - Richard Fuller (1972) Dare to be naive. - Richard Fuller (1975) For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea. - Enoch Powell (1984) The Devil himself had probably redesigned Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts. - Anthony Price (1989) He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay. - Saying (ca. 1020 A.D.) Much would have more. - Saying (ca. 1350) Hasty climbers have sudden falls. - Saying (ca. 1450) He that goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing. - Saying (ca. 1490) An inch in a miss is as good as a yard. - Saying (ca. 1600) Little leaks sink the ship. - Saying (ca. 1610) If everyone would sweep his own doorstep, the City would soon be clean. - Saying (ca. 1620) The mill cannot grind with water that is past. - Saying (ca. 1630) Eloquence ... consists ... in a correspondence ... between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak on the one hand, and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions which we employ. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject, [with] in it nothing of excess or defect. - Blaise Pascal (1670) There is less in this than meets the eye. - Tallulah Bankhead (1922) The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. - Eric Blair (1946) Your public servants serve you right. - Adlai Stevenson (1952) I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. - Roberto Rosselini (1954) ... shouting is not a substitute for thinking and reason is not the subversion but the salvation of freedom. - Adlai Stevenson (1954) Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer ... we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. - Werner Heisenberg (1958) Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. - Abbott Liebling (1960) Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt. - Graham Greene (1978) Why keep a dog and bark yourself? - Saying (ca. 1590) Intimidation without virtue is disastrous; virtue without intimidation is powerless. - Maximilien Robespierre (ca. 1790) A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself. - Joseph Pulitzer (ca. 1900) Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny. - Charles Reade (pub. 1903) It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. - Theodore Roosevelt (1910) Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else. - William A. P. Rogers (1924) When people feel deeply, impartiality is bias. - John Reith, 1st Baron Reith (1949). By the time the civil service has finished drafting a document to give effect to a principle, there may be little of the principle left. - John Reith, 1st Baron Reith (1949) Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above. - James Agree (1951) We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. - Edward Murrow (1954) No other man-made device since the shields and lances of ancient knights fulfils a man’s ego like an automobile. - William Rootes, 1st Baron Rootes (1958) Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a nation. - Stanislaw Lec (1962) The computer is no better than its program. - Elting Morison (1966) No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. - Stanislaw Lec (1968) The bottom line is in heaven. - Edwin Land (1977) Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror. - Anita Roddick (1997) Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Children break windows and chairs, when their teacher is absent. Soldiers set fire to a camp which they are leaving, even though the general has forbidden that. They love to put to flight any hope of a harvest, and to demolish fine buildings. What pushes them to leave everywhere long scars of their barbarity? Isn’t it because feeble souls associate with destruction an idea of daring and power? - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally. - Hector Munro (1910) Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. - Bertrand Russell (1930) All science is either physics or stamp collecting. - Ernest Rutherford (1962) A venal city ripe to perish, if a buyer can be found. - Gaius Sallustius (ca. 50 B.C.) Imagination--It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false. I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; and it is among them that the imagination has the great gift of persuasion. Reason protests in vain; it cannot set a true value on things. - Blaise Pascal (1670) If any Man will draw up his case, and put his name at the foot of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply. Where he compels me to turn over the sheet, he must await my leisure. - John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (pub. 1884) English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions. - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury (1877) No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense. - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury (1877) Where property is in question .. I ... erect individual liberty as an idol, ... and resent all attempts to destroy or fetter it; but when you pass from liberty to life, in no well-governed State, in no State governed according to the principles of common humanity, are the claims of mere liberty allowed to endanger the lives of the citizens. - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury (1877) To defend a bad policy as an “error of judgement” does not excuse it--the right functioning of a man’s judgement is his most fundamental responsibility. - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury (1877) (pub. 1931) Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Such is the craze of some men who, without any animosity or particular reason, make it their duty to attack people with big reputations and to mistrust?? the authority of the public’s judgments, simply to affect more independence in their feelings, and from fear of judging as others do. I compare such people to the weak who, fearing to appear to be governed, stubbornly reject the best advice, and madly follow their fantasies to try out their liberty. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) One must abide by the enlightened and impartial criticisms made about even the most praiseworthy people or works. I hate the heat displayed by some men who cannot bear seeing that someone separates the defects of those whom they admire, from their perfections and wishes to sanctify all of it; but how even more insupportable is the mania of those who make it their duty to attack those with big reputations and to distrust the authority of public judgments, thinking only maybe to affect greater independence. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. - Jorge Santayana (1905) Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. - Jorge Santayana (1905) Inspiration descends only in flashes, to clothe circumstances; it is not stored up in a barrel, like salt herrings, to be doled out. - Patrick White (1957) Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty. - Albert Camus (1960) A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. ... Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse. - Albert Camus (1960) Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism. - Carl Jung (1962) Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. - Carl Jung (1963) ... I said to my father “Old Mr Senex is showing his age; he sometimes talks quite stupidly.” My father replied, “That isn’t his age. He’s always been stupid. He is just losing his ability to conceal it.” - Robertson Davies (1991) The world’s history is the world’s judgment. - Friedrich von Schiller (1786) With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. - Friedrich von Schiller (1801) It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well-put is half solved. - John Dewey (1938) Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more interesting than the inventions themselves. - George Polya (1945) Analogy pervades all our thinking. - George Polya (1945) If you cannot solve the proposed problem ... try to solve first some related problem. - George Polya (1945) The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes--ah, that is where the art resides! - Artur Schnabel (pub. 1958) The law is not a “light” for you or for any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safety. - Robert Bolt (1960) Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture. - Andrei Sakharov (1968) Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. - Andrei Sakharov (1968) The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1972) Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience ... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1972) Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t. - Pete Seeger (1980) Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it. - Charles Scott (pub. 1985) [Over-government is] government of the busy by the bossy for the bully. - Arthur Seldon (1990) Jacques: I do not like her name.> Orlando: There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened. - As You Like It (1599-1600) The nature of bad news infects the teller. - Antony and Cleopatra (1606) In time we hate that which we often fear. - Antony and Cleopatra (1606) Truth, ’tis supposed, may bear all lights; ... things are to be viewed, in order to [gain] a thorough recognition ... we discern whatever is liable to ridicule in any subject. - Anthony Cooper, 3d Earl of Shaftesbury Gladstone ... spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question. - Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman (1930) I am not going to spend any time whatsoever in attacking the Foreign Secretary ... If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present. - Aneurin Bevan (1957) I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. - Aneurin Bevan (1960) When television is bad, nothing is worse. [From] when your station goes on the air ... until the station signs off ... you will observe a vast wasteland. - Newton Minow (1961) “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?> That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun. - Thomas Lehrer (1965) Future shock ... the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time. - Alvin Toffler (1970) Rumor is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it. - Henry 4 Part 2 (1597-99) I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. - Henry 4 Part 2 (1597-99) And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. - Hamlet (1599-1600) For in the fatness of these pursy times, Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg. - Hamlet (1599-1600) If your enemy turns to flee, give him a silver bridge. - Spanish saying Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers. - William Penn (1693) Have a care therefore where there is more sail than ballast. - William Penn (1693) Most men of letters value greatly the arts, but don’t value virtue at all; they love Alexander’s portrait more than his generosity. Images of things move them, but the actual thing, not at all. They want to be treated as workmen; and they are workmen to their fingertips, and to the marrow of their bones. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The first and greatest principles are too strong for mediocre writers, for those things would reduce them to not writing at all. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Business was his aversion; pleasure was his business. - Maria Edgeworth (1804) The bodies of those that made such a noise and tumult when alive, when dead, lie as quietly among the graves of their neighbors as any others. - Jonathan Edwards (1834) Long experience has taught me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong. - Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (1956) The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children. - Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward 8) “I’m world famous,” Dr. Parks said, “all over Canada.” - Mordecai Richler (1963) It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. - Woody Allen (1975) Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. - Arthur Eddington (pub. 1982) Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. - Janet Malcolm (1990) All those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness. All those happy in the world are so because of their desire for the happiness of others. - Shantideva (ca. 720) The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult. - Marie-Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1763) The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. - Adam Smith (1776) It is in vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity; they must have action; and they will make it, if they cannot find it. - Charlotte Brontë (1847) Believing has a core of unbelieving. - U.S. saying (ca. 1850) The spirit of self-help is the core of all genuine growth in the individual. - Samuel Smiles (1859) It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results. - Walter Bagehot (1867) Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it. - G.B. Shaw (1887) Teach [my son] to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people. - Mary Shelley (pub. 1888) By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean. - Samuel Clemens (1897) We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. - G.B. Shaw (1898) In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. - G.B. Shaw (1903) If it were an innocent, passive, gullibility it would be excusable; but all too clearly, alas, it is an active willingness to be deceived. - Peter Medawar (1961) The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present. - Eileen Shanahan (1968) When people are put into positions slightly above what they expect, they’re apt to excel. - Richard Branson (1992) ... when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself. - Terry Pratchett (1997) Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished. - Francis Bacon (1625) Satire is a sort of [looking-]glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own. - Jonathan Swift (1704) Good maxims are subject to becoming trivial. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The true masters of policy and morals are those who try for all the good that one can achieve, and nothing more. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Prosperity of bad kings ruins the liberty of their peoples. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. - Jonathan Swift (1726) Qualities too lofty often unsuit one for society. We take no ingots with us to market; we take silver or small change. - Sébastien-Nicolas (de Chamfort) (pub. 1796) More people are flattered into virtue than are bullied out of vice. - Robert Surtees (1846) Bourgeois ... is an epithet which the riff-raff apply to what is respectable, and the aristocracy to what is decent. - Anthony Hope (1894) The art of government is the organization of idolatry. - G. B. Shaw (1903) A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. - G. B. Shaw (1944) That seductive border region where politics grease the wheels of business and polite society smiles hopefully on both. - Richard Tawney (1958) The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. - Thomas Szasz (1973) Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to. - Hannen Swaffer (pub. 1974) Those who stand for nothing fall for anything. - Alexander Hamilton (1978) No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well. - Margaret Thatcher (1980) Foreign aid is a system of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. - Peter Bauer, Baron Bauer (1990) Computers are anti-Faraday machines. He said he couldn’t understand anything until he could count it, while computers count everything and understand nothing. - Ralph Cornes (1991). We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. - Robert Wilensky (1997) Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer. - Henry 6 Part 3 (1591) He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. - Sir Francis Bacon (1625) Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. - Laurence Sterne (1767) It is in the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. - Laurence Sterne (1767) He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. - William Blake (1793) The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual. - Samuel Smiles (1859) Vox populi, vox humbug. - William Sherman (1863) Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible. - Sydney Smith (pub. 1876) Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. - Robert Stevenson (1882) In all change there is something at the same time sordid and agreeable, which smacks of infidelity and household moves. This suffices to explain the French Revolution. - Charles Baudelaire (1887) If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. - Robert Stevenson (1892) When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. - G.B. Shaw (1901) The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - G.B. Shaw (1903) Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. - Robert Frost (1914) Calling a spade a spade never made the spade interesting yet. Take my advice, leave spades alone. - Edith Sitwell (1933) Action without thought is like shooting without aiming. - American saying (ca. 1950) [A committee is] a group of men who individually can do nothing, but as a group decide that nothing can be done. - Fred Allen (ca. 1950) Business is like a car: it will not run by itself except downhill. - American saying (ca. 1950) Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”, but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said “Let us march.” - Adlai Stevenson (pub. 1969) Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time. - Edward Forster (pub. 1974) The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. - Tom Stoppard (1978) If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan (1980) The book is the greatest interactive medium of all time. You can underline it, write in the margins, fold down a page, skip ahead. And you can take it anywhere. - Michael Lynton (1996) Look for what’s missing. Many advisers can tell a president how to improve what’s proposed, or what’s gone amiss. Few are able to see what isn’t there. - Donald Rumsfeld (2001) Do not make a beggar by banqueting upon borrowing. - Ecclesiastes Evil doers are evil dreaders. - English saying (ca. 1550) Severity breedeth fear, but roughness breedeth hate. Even reproofs from authority ought to be grave, and not taunting. - Sir Francis Bacon (1625) By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence may be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as novelty. - Michael Wigglesworth (1650) The last drop makes the cup run over. - English saying (ca 1650) Nor is the people’s judgement always true: The most may err as grossly as the few. - John Dryden (1681) An open foe may prove curse, But a pretended friend is worse. - John Gay (1727) It is wonderful, when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession. - Samuel Johnson (1775) The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. - Charles Lamb (1823) If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! - Samuel Coleridge (1831) It takes two to speak the truth,--one to speak, and another to hear. - Henry Thoreau (1849) As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. - Henry Thoreau (1854) History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. - Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people. - Anthony Trollope (1862) To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character. - Fedor Dostoyevsky (1862) A fainéant government is not the worst government that England can have. It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something. - Anthony Trollope (1869) There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press. - Samuel Clemens (1873) A man’s mind will very generally refuse to make itself up until it be driven and compelled by emergency. - Anthony Trollope (1881) Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors. - Anthony Trollope (pub. 1883) Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town? - Samuel Clemens (1884) Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes. - Oscar Wilde (1892) It is easy--terribly easy--to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. - G. B. Shaw (1898) You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends. - Joseph Conrad (1900) Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder. - G. B. Shaw (1903) In the midst of life we are in debt. - Ethel Mumford (1907) He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. - G. B. Shaw (1907) What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922) The most conservative man in the world is the British Trade Unionist when you want to change him. - Ernest Bevin (1927) Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else. - Hillaire Belloc (1931) [Teaching reading] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. - George Trevelyan (1942) Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. - Paul Valéry (1943) Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way. - Jean Anouilh (1955) Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. - Laurens van der Post (1958) What time [Richard Jebb] can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties. - William Thompson (pub. 1960) Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. - Norman Mailer (1966) Canadians do not like heroes, and so they do not have them. - George Woodcock (1970) We do not experience and thus we have no measure of the disasters we prevent. - John Galbraith (1981) Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. - Elie Wiesel (1986) Balancing the budget is like going to heaven. Everybody wants to do it, but nobody wants to do what you have to do to get there. - Phil Gramm (1990) Every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ’an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into the developer fluid. - Edward Wilson (1997) Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness. - traditional saying Never break a covenant, whether you make it with a false man or a just man of good conscience. The covenant holds for both, the false and the just. - Zoroaster (6th cent. B.C) A ruler who governs his state by virtue is like the north polar star, which remains in its place while all the other stars revolve around it. - Confucius (ca. 500 B.C.) He that touches pitch shall be defiled. - English saying (ca. 1320) Prevention is better than cure. - English saying (ca. 1620) A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool. - Jean Poquelin (Molière) (1672) One can know perfectly one’s own imperfection without being humiliated by that realization. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Nothing lasts except the truth. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Laws, the most beautiful invention of reason, have not been able to make people calmer and smoother, without reducing their liberty. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) He who would do good to another, must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer. - William Blake (1815) Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense--nonsense upon stilts. - Jeremy Bentham (pub. 1843) The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools. - Herbert spencer (1891) Will the last generation of the twentieth century differ very much from the first? Will they be healthier and longer-lived, wiser, better, and more intelligent, or will they remain substantially the same as the people we have known and the people whom history has portrayed to us? - Anonymous (1901) For if unhappiness develops the forces of the mind, happiness alone is salutary to the body. - Marcel Proust (1926) Human kind Cannot bear very much reality. - Thomas Eliot (1936) I hate ‘Humanity’ and all such abstracts: but I love people. Lovers of “Humanity” generally hate people and children, and keep parrots or puppy dogs. - Roy Campbell (1951) If the myth gets bigger than the man, print the myth. - Dorothy Johnson (1953) Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good. - Ian McEwan (1998) By nature men are alike. Through practice they have become far apart. - Confucius (ca. 490 B.C.) Unless you know to which port you are sailing, no wind is favorable. - Seneca Jr. (ca. 60 A.D.) Between two stools one falls to the ground. - English saying (ca. 1390) One story is good ’til another is told. - English saying (ca. 1590) God and the doctor we alike adore But only when in danger, not before; The danger o’er, both are alike requited, God is forgotten, and the doctor slighted. - John Owen (1606 ff.) Nothing so bold as a blind mare. - Scots saying (pub 1628) Reading good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries - in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts. - Rene Descartés (1637) Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper. - English saying (ca. 1650) The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. - Blaise Pascal (1670) Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. - Alexander Pope (1711) It often happens that people’s opinion of us is proportional to how we regard ourselves. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The greatest works of human mind are clearly the least perfect. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Only strong and penetrating souls make truth the main object of their passions. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out. - Georg Lichtenberg (1775-76) The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt. - John Curran (1790) The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can’t hear yourself speak. - Georg Lichtenberg (179__)? Show me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will show you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself. Beware of those who are homeless by choice. - Robert Southey (1812) Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps. - Thomas Macaulay, First Baron Macaulay (1828) Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. - Benjamin Disraeli (1832) We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. - Henry Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston (1848) Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. - Charlotte Brontë (1848) If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly said in one, then it’s amateur work. - Robert Stevenson (1888) Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. - Oscar Wilde (1891) It is not until the pack has yelled itself hoarse that the level voice of justice is heard in praise. - Max Beerbohm (1894) However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will think it wrong. - William Maugham (1896) Criticism is not only medicinally salutary: it has positive popular attractions in its cruelty, its gladiatorship, and the gratification given to envy by its attacks on the great, and to enthusiasm by its praises. - George Shaw (1898) People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. - William Maugham (1915) When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. - Guillaume Apollinaire (1918) An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. - Francis Fitzgerald (1920) The illustrations, which are far more numerous and less apposite than comports with the dignity of history, may be imputed to the publishers, for publishers seek to attract readers whom authors would wish to repel. - Alfred Housman (1923) Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley (1927) Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, [and] enjoyed by plain persons, ... he cannot possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain. - Arnold Bennett (1928) All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for. - Logan Smith (1931) Reformers are always finally neglected, while the memoirs of the frivolous will always eagerly be read. - Henry Channon (1936) No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft. - Herbert Wells (193__?) Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens. - William Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge (1944) Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy--or even two orthodoxies, as often happens--good writing stops. - Eric Blair (Orwell) (1946) It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life. - Randall Jarrell (1954) Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. - Albert von Szent-Györgyi (195__)? Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to be a man of value. - Albert Einstein (1955) Let us [journalists] today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand. - Phillip Graham (1963) Experts have their expert fun ex-cathedra telling one just how nothing can be done - Piet Hein (1966) Loopholes are not always of a fixed dimension. They tend to enlarge as the numbers that pass through wear them away. - Harold Lever (1968) In Ireland the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs. - John Mahaffy (pub. 1971) Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974) History, like wood, has a grain in it which determines how it splits; and those in authority, besides trying to shape and direct events, sometimes find it more convenient just to let them happen. - Malcolm Muggeridge (1975) The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers. - Stan Barstow (1989) There is, perhaps, no more dangerous man in the world than the man with the sensibilities of an artist but without creative talent. With luck such men make wonderful theatrical impresarios and interior decorators, or else they become mass murderers or critics. - Barry Humphries (1992) It’s very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. - Salman Rushdie (1994) I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism. - Phyllis James, Baroness James of Holland Park (1995) Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety. - Trevor Nunn (1999) Learn to say “I don’t know”. If used when appropriate, it will be often. - Donald Rumsfeld (2001) And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all. - Lucretius (ca. 60 B.C.) Thought is free. - English saying ca. (1390) Persons are not like garments, the worse for wearing. - Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex (1599) Ill news hath wings, and with the wind doth go, Comfort’s a cripple and comes ever slow. - Michael Drayton (1603) Rome was not built in a day. - Saying (ca 1650) Beware the fury of a patient man. - John Dryden (1681) Everyone speaks well of the bridge which carries him over. - English saying (ca. 1690) Crooked things may be as stiff and unflexible as straight; and men may be as positive in error as in truth. - John Locke (1690) When an old man dies, a library burns down. - Malian saying Some praise at morning what they blame at night; But always think the last opinion right. - Alexander Pope (1711) Shakespeare (whom you and every playhouse bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, wing’d his roving flight, and grew immortal in his own despite. - Alexander Pope (1737) Dissimulation is an effort of the intellect, far from being a natural vice. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections et Maximes (1746) Someone who needs an incentive to begin to lie, is not a born liar. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections et Maximes (1746) Hope produces more dupes than cleverness. - Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections et Maximes (1746) The eye of a master does more work than both his hands. - English saying (ca. 1750) Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. - Edmund Burke (1774) Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. - John Keats (1817) Only habit of persistent work can make one continually content; it produces an opium that numbs the soul. - Gustave Flaubert (1851) Your newspaper people are the only traders that thrive upon convulsion. In quiet times who cares for the paper? In times of tumult, who does not? - Walter Bagehot (1852) Has Canada no poet to describe the glories of his parent land - no painter that can delineate her matchless scenery of land and wave? Are her children dumb and blind, that they leave to strangers the task of singing her praise? The standard literature of Canada must be looked for in the newspapers. - Susannah Moodie (1853) If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. - Charles Spurgeon (1859) Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. - John Ruskin (1865) Newspaper editors sport daily with the names of men of whom they do not hesitate to publish almost the severest words that can be uttered; but let an editor be himself attacked, even without his name, and he thinks that the thunderbolt of heaven should fall upon the offender. - Anthony Trollope (1874) A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. - Thomas Hardy (1888) A novel is an impression, not an argument. - Thomas Hardy (1892) Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. - Samuel Butler (1895) Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work. - Joseph Conrad (1900) As a contribution to natural history, The Wind in the Willows is negligible. - E. V. Lucas (1908) The gods send nuts to those who have no teeth. - Saying (ca. 1910) Thank God, in these days of enlightenment and establishment, everyone has a right to his own opinions, and chiefly to the opinion that nobody else has a right to theirs. - Ronald Knox (1914) We have in modern society a huge journalistic organism the ‘critical’ or review press which must be fed - there simply is not enough, nowhere near enough, good creative work to feed the ‘critical’ machine, and so reputations are manufactured to feed it, and works born perfectly dead enjoy an illusory life. - Thomas Eliot (1920) At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. - Francis Fitzgerald (1920) One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. - Marina Tsvetaeva (ca. 1920) It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling. - O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) (1920) The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender. - Phillip Guedalla (1920) Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. - Herbert Wells (1920) One of the pleasures of middle age is to find that one WAS right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23. - Ezra Pound (1934) Lady Peabury ... had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit. - Evelyn Waugh (1942) You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say. - Francis Fitzgerald (pub. 1945) The first aim of the journalist is to interest; of the historian it is to instruct - of course the good journalist and the good historian try to do both. - Alan Taylor (1948) Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs. - Aldous Huxley (1950) Kipling is intensely loved and hated. Hardly any reader likes him a little. - Clive Lewis (1950) The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong. - Georges Bidault (1962) Every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ‘an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid’. - Edward Wilson (196__) ... in life we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. - (20th Century American saying) In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1975) This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1980) You can’t think rationally on an empty stomach, and a whole lot of people can’t do it on a full stomach either. - John Reith, First Baron Reith (1977) The man who works and is not bored is never old. - Pablo Casals (pub. 1985) There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them. - Elie Wiesel (1988) Journalism could be described as turning one’s enemies into money. - Craig Brown (1990) We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. - Robert Hughes (1993) Though it often apes scientific language, critical theory would not be recognized as theory by any scientist, since it does not open itself to experimental verification. Composed purely of assertions, not testable hypotheses, it can have no bearing on reality and no explanatory value. - John Carey (1994) Pessimism was dear to him in its impersonation of profundity and its implication of arcane knowledge. - Candia McWilliam (1994) A novelist must systematically desystematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas. - Milan Kundera (1995) Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art. - Jeanette Winterson (1995) The trial lawyer’s job and the novelist’s were, in some aspects, shockingly similar. Both involved the reconstruction of experience, usually through many voices, whether they were witnesses or characters. - Scott Turow (2001) Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them. - François Arouet [Voltaire] (1764) [A Jacobin is] A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country but his own. - George Canning (1821) To ask the hard question is simple. - Wystan Auden (1933) Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle. - American saying, ca. 1950 Anybody who is not shocked by the subject has failed to understand it. - Niels Bohr (pub. 1990) [C.P. Snow was] A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska - sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within. - Francis King (1993) Kings have long arms. - British saying (ca. 1550) It is harder to make one’s name by a perfect work than it is for a mediocre one to win esteem through the name one already has. - Jean de la Bruyére (1688) Fools admire everything in a respected author. - François Arouet (Voltaire) (1759) Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. - Samuel Johnson (1772) Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though for but one year, can never willingly abandon it. - Edmund Burke (1791) A great man’s book in this country is like a candle in Lapland, extinguished the moment after it was lit by insects, gnats, and buzzflies. - Samuel Coleridge (ca. 1800) Property has its duties as well as its rights. - Thomas Drummond (1838) Economy was always “elegant”, and money-spending always “vulgar” and ostentatious - a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied. - Elizabeth Gaskell 1853) I am strongly of opinion that an author had far better not read any reviews of his books. The unfavourable ones are almost certain to make him cross, and the favourable ones conceited; and neither of these results is desirable. - Charles Dodgson (1893) The business of selection and revision is simply hell for me - my efforts to cut out 50,000 words may sometimes result in my adding 75,000. - Thomas Wolfe (1928) There can be nothing so gratifying to an author as to arouse the respect and esteem of the reader. Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. - William Maugham (1930) People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little. - Ivy Compton-Burnett (1939) Both poverty and prosperity come from spending money - prosperity from spending it wisely. - U.S. saying (ca. 1950) As usual the [British] Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound. - Harold Macmillan (1961) I constantly rewrite - an incinerator is a writer’s best friend. - Thornton Wilder (1961) Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. - John K. Galbraith (1962) One cannot review a bad book without showing off. - William Auden (1962) A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service. - Georges Pompidou (1973) The metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is one of the most important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth century. - Jeremy Rifkin (1995) Sine ira et studio (Without anger or partiality) - Marcus Tacitus (ca. 100 AD) The early man never borrows from the late man. - English saying (ca. 1650) It is easier to know man in general than to understand one man in particular. - François, duc de la Rochefoucauld (1665) Summaries that contain most things are always shortest themselves. - Samuel Butler (ca. 1670) He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weaknesses of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine. - Baruch Spinoza (pub. 1677) There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. - Edmund Burke (1769) The human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return, by degrees, to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition. - Edward Gibbon (ca 1780). Flattery, like perfume, should be smelled, not swallowed. - U.S. saying (ca. 1850) They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind. - Anthony Trollope (1869) What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place? - Thomas Huxley (1893) Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious. - Gilbert Chesterton (1903) I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire. - Winston Churchill (1926) The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature. - Sigmund Freud (1927) Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones. - Sigmund Freud (1938) Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen. - Albert Einstein (1950) Like a monkey scratching for the wrong fleas, every age assiduously seeks out in itself those vices which it does not in fact have, while ignoring the large, red, beady-eyed crawlers who scuttle around unimpeded. - Katharine Whitehorn (1970) Confound those who have said our remarks before us. - Aelius Donatus (ca A.D. 350) The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe to the pitcher. The pitcher fell on the stone? Woe to the pitcher. - old Hebrew saying Pride feels no pain. - English saying ca. 1620 In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity. - Richard Baxter (ca. 1670) We learn from experience that not everything which is incredible is untrue. - Jean de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1675) Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion; and he whose real wants are supplied, must admit those of fancy. - Samuel Johnson (1759) There are so many fine and substantial things in the world at any one time, but they are not in touch with each other. - Johann Goethe (ca. 1810) Those who have served the cause of the revolution have ploughed the sea. - Simon Bolivar (ca. 1825) I may be wrong, but I have never found deserting friends conciliates enemies. - Margot Asquith (1927) It is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund-rate. - Dorothy Parker (1929) I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty ... But I am too busy thinking about myself. - Edith Sitwell (1950) Men love women, women love children; children love hamsters – It’s quite hopeless. - Alice Ellis (pub. 1987) A quotation is what a speaker wants to say -- unlike a soundbite which is all that an interviewer allows you to say. - Anthony Benn (1996) No one boasts of what belongs to another. - Ashanti saying Once the boat is in midstream, it is too late to stop the leak. - Chinese saying If you are surety for the bow, you are surety for the arrow. - Chinese saying Better a friend’s bite than an enemy’s caress. - Danish saying Blossoms are not fruit. - Dutch saying Someone blaming something wants to buy it. - English saying People do not value any of their blessings until they are gone. - English saying Everyone absent shares some blame, but all present have an excuse. - French saying A thousand blows do not hurt if on another person’s back. - Greek saying The blade wears out the sheath. - Japanese saying To a dog, a bone is more valuable than a pearl. - Philippine saying Those who blame themselves praise themselves. - Polish saying A boaster and a liar are near akin. - Scottish saying To deal with a blockhead, you need much brain. - Spanish saying Better a blow from a wise man than a kiss from a fool. - Yiddish saying Books give knowledge, but life gives understanding. - Yiddish saying With your brother eat and drink, but do no business. - Albanian saying It’s hard to pay for bread already eaten. - Danish saying The highest branch is not the safest roost. - English saying If the brain does not sow corn, it plants thistles. - English saying One who does not want to make bread sifts the flour all day long. - Greek saying Cut bread cannot be joined together again. - Latvian saying To put an end to the bugs, burn the bed. - Mexican saying Where there’s bread there are mice. - Russian saying You can’t be a broom and stay clean. - Yiddish saying Great is Truth, and mighty above all things. - 1 Esdras Force, unaided by judgment, collapses through its own weight. - Quintus Horace (ca. 10 B.C.) There is no proverb which is not true. - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (ca. 1610) Nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little. - Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1625) It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. - Samuel Johnson (1750) A person may be indebted for a nose or an eye, for a graceful carriage or a voluble discourse, to a great-aunt or uncle, whose existence he has scarcely heard of. - William Hazlitt (1821) The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it. - William Hazlitt (1839) There is much of mankind that a man can learn only from himself. - Walter Bagehot (1879) Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde (1905) A platitude is simply a truth repeated until people get tired of hearing it. - Stanley Baldwin, first Earl Baldwin (1924) I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like butter and sugar, not even at Cambridge. - Virginia Woolf (1929) The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. - Carl Jung (1933) A life, admirable at first sight, may have cost so much in imposed liabilities, chores and self-abasement, that, brilliant though it appears, it cannot be considered as other than a failure. Another, which seems to have misfired, is in reality a triumphant success, because it has cost so little. - Henry de Montherland (ca. 1940) Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point. - Clive Lewis (1944) As to our universities, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are elitist where they should be egalitarian and egalitarian where they should be elitist. - David Lodge (1989) When a fierce debate persists, and few agree, suspect that the best arguments for each side are little known. - Anonymous A good case is easy to state. - Ashanti saying If you hunt with cats, you catch mice. - Danish and Dutch sayings Don’t cool off what doesn’t burn you. - Dutch saying After the calf drowns, they cover over the well. - Dutch saying Be cautious when prosperous, patient in adversity. - Dutch saying One person beats the bush, another catches the bird. - Dutch and German sayings Care is no cure. - English saying Don’t leave certainty for hope. - English saying Everybody’s business is no one’s business. - English saying Fools first take pride in their wisdom. - English saying Greasing a cause well makes it stretch. - English saying Old carts well used outlast new ones abused. - English saying Only private charity is real. - English saying Stronger than iron chains are gold chains. - English saying You don’t feel the burden you chose. - English saying When all take care of themselves, all are cared for. - English saying Scalded cats fear cold water. - French and Philippine sayings You can know character only by waiting. - Hausa saying Certainty of a straddle is better. - Irish saying It is easy to threaten a bull from a window - Italian saying Prolix words after a cause is lost. - Italian saying Wise captains carry more ballast than sail. - Jamaican saying Cheerfulness is health’s true flower. - Japanese saying Good calligraphers are not choosy about their brushes. - Japanese sayings To deny the cat milk is to give the mouse cream. - Russian saying Better to give it up entirely, than do it carelessly. - Russian saying Those angry without a cause must settle without amends. - Scottish saying Buying what you don’t need is stealing from yourself. - Swedish saying A butterfly often forgets that it was a caterpillar. - Swedish saying A camel with bells is not a lost camel. - Turkish saying We endure daily the harm coming from carelessness. - Turkish saying In the end, caution brings speed. - Yiddish saying If you don’t keep a cat, you keep mice. - Yugoslav saying True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (198__) Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. - St. Matthew We have qualities and inclinations so much our own, and so incorporated in us, that we have not the means to feel and recognize them: and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain bent, without our knowledge or consent. - Michel de Montaigne (ca. 1586). What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care. - William Shakespeare (1599) The rhetoric wherewith I persuade another cannot persuade myself: there is a depraved appetite in all us, that will with patience hear the learned instructions of reason, but yet perform no further than agrees to its own irregular humour. - Sir Thomas Browne (1643) You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, or any one century. - Baltasar Gracian y Morales (1647) [Charles II] never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one. - John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (pub. 1706) [Rochester’s comment] is very true: for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers’. - Charles II (pub. 1706) A man does not mind being blamed for his faults, and being punished for them, and he patiently suffers much for them; but he becomes impatient if he is required to give them up. - Johann von Goethe (ca. 1820?) An imaginative man is apt to see, in his life, the story of his life; and is thereby led to conduct himself in life in such a manner as to make a good story of it rather than a good life. - Sir Henry Taylor 1836) One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. - Thomas Huxley (1893) Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. - American saying (ca. 1920) Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling (1923) Today words have become battles. The right words, battles won; the wrong words, battles lost. - Erich von Ludendorff (pub. 1938) In anything it is a mistake to think one can perform an action or behave in a certain way once and no more. What one does, one will do again, indeed has probably already done in the distant past. - Cesare Pavese (ca. 1945) Two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all. - saying (ca. 1950) Let your prayers for a good crop be short and your weeding long. - Albanian saying A cripple on the right road beats an athlete on the wrong road. - American saying If you try to show the moon to a child, he sees only your finger. - Bemba saying Custom is rust that mocks every file. - Czech saying Advice to a fool is like water on a goose. - Danish saying What you can’t cure you must endure. - English saying Advice after the fact is like rain after harvest. - Danish saying Better reap two days too soon than one too late. - Dutch saying A creditor has a better memory than a debtor. - English saying They who will not be counselled, can’t be helped. - English saying Advice is cheap, but repentance is costly. - English saying Those always complaining are never pitied. - English saying The latecomer makes all the others fast. - English saying Even a child can beat a man who is tied up. - English saying With good advice it does not matter who gives it. - English saying The greatest cunning is to have no cunning. - French saying Good advice is recognized by all but those who need it. - German saying Value advice from the old and knowledge from the learned. - Greek saying With a hot coal you burn yourself; with a cold one, you blacken yourself. - Greek saying Between two cowards, the advantage comes to the one who first detects the other. - Italian saying Courtesy is called for even with intimate friends. - Japanese saying Better be swallowed whole by a crocodile, than nibbled slowly by tiny fishes. - Malayan saying Courtesy is compatible with bravery. - Mexican saying If you flee the cross you bear, you will surely find another. - Mexican saying Cunning is followed by foolishness. - Ovambo saying Come not to advise uncalled. - Scottish saying Danger past and God forgotten. - Scottish saying Come uncalled, sit unserved. - Scottish saying When your cup is full, carry it even. - Scottish saying Conscience is the nest hatching all good. - Welsh saying For the disease of stubbornness, there is no cure. - Yiddish saying Uphill one climbs slowly; downhill one rolls fast. - Yiddish saying Being a critic is easier than being an author. - Yiddish saying If your body were to be put at the disposal of a stranger, you would certainly be indignant. Then are you not ashamed of putting your mind at the disposal of a chance acquaintance, by allowing yourself to be upset if he happens to abuse you? - Epictetus (ca. A.D. 85) How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted them to the same person? - François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, (1665) The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. - Blaise Pascal (pub. 1670) None so empty, as those who are full of themselves. - Benjamin Whichcote (1703) When men are easy in themselves, they let others remain so. - Anthony Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1711) He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. - Samuel Johnson (ca. 1752) Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. - Samuel Johnson (1772) Personal resentment, though no laudable motive to satire, can add great force to a general principle. Self-love is a busy prompter. - Samuel Johnson (ca. 1780) You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing’s vile hard reading. - Richard Sheridan (pub. 1819) Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble. - Walter Scott (1823) When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” - Charles Lamb (1829) Voltaire speaks to a party, Molière speaks to society, Shakespeare speaks to mankind. - Victor Hugo (1834) The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity. - Benjamin Disraeli (1845) A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time. He alone knows the correct time, but of what use is this to him? The whole world is guided by the clocks that show the wrong time. - Artur Schopenhauer (1851) The moment we care for anything deeply, the world--that is all the other miscellaneous interests--becomes our enemy. - Gilbert Chesterton (1905) E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea. - Katherine Mansfield (1917) Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces. - James Agate (1933) Almost from the cradle to the grave one has an audience to whom one is playing up. The story of these audiences succeeding one another, their character and quality should be treated as an important part of a biography or an autobiography. - Bernard Berenson (ca. 1939) Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is a good reason for it. There is always something inferior there, although not just where we persuade ourselves that it is. - Carl Jung (1943) There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that. - William Maugham (pub. 1949) [P.G. Wodehouse is] English literature’s performing flea. - Sean O’Casey (1951) Learning what is good takes over a thousand days, but learning what is evil is done in minutes. - Chinese saying A little debt creates a debtor, a great debt an enemy. - English saying The wolf’s death is the sheep’s health. - English saying It is never a bad day which has a good night. - English saying On death, the rich have no money, and the poor no debt. - Estonian saying One day is as good as two for a person who does everything in its place. - French saying Better old debts than old grudges. - Irish saying Pity the man who waits until the last day. - Irish saying You can repay money debts, but kindness indebts you forever. - Malay saying Bear no grudge against the dead. - Japanese saying Death and a good proverb are both concise. - Russian saying Each day learns from the one before, but no day teaches the one following. - Russian saying A good day often costs a hundred bad nights. - Swedish saying Fame is sometimes like unto a kind of mushroom, which Pliny recounts to be the greatest miracle in nature, because growing and having no root. - Thomas Fuller (1642) Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose. - Baltasar Gracian y Morales (1647) The clever man often worries; the loyal person is often overworked. - “Mr Tut-Tut” (ca. 1650) Fools invent fashions, and wise men are fain to follow them. - Samuel Butler (ca. 1670) A man has made great progress in cunning when he does not seem too clever to others. - Jean de La Bruyére (1688) The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly. - Henri Beyle (Stendhal) (1822) The very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists. - Charles Colton (1825) Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory. - Sydney Smith (1855) Fools claim one only learns at one’s own expense, but I’ve always tried to learn at the expense of others. - Otto von Bismarck (pub. 1872) Merit envies success, and success takes itself for merit. - Jean Rostand (1925) No one can deny a mathematical demonstration. - American saying If you want dinner, don’t offend the cook. - Chinese saying Fixing one difficulty keeps a hundred others away. - Chinese saying Have discretion in giving, memory in accepting. - Czech saying Once you embark with the devil, you must sail with him. - Dutch saying Those despising the little are not worthy of the great. - Dutch saying Good direction is better than hard work. - English saying Diligence is good luck’s mother. - English, German, and Welsh sayings Not every devil has a cloven foot. - English saying Once deceiving, ever after suspected. - English saying A civil refusal is better than rude agreement - English saying Out of debt, out of danger. - English and Japanese sayings Desire never rests. - English saying Until the truth can be tried out, deem the best explanation true. - English saying The fool starts his business while the discreet are still advising. - English saying The devil tempts some, and the idle tempt the devil. - English saying Every shameful act carries with it an excuse. - Greek saying Every evil deed is repaid on earth. - Greek saying Once you are determined, only action remains. - Italian saying Small causes give serious disasters. - Japanese saying Let the devil into a church, and he will climb into the pulpit. - Latvian saying In an ant’s house, the dew is a flood. - Persian saying Debt is worse than poverty. - Slovakian saying As all Feats of Activity are the more admired, the nearer they come to Danger, so is all Speculative wit the nearer it comes to Nonsense. - Samuel Butler (ca. 1670) The greatest of all secrets is knowing how to reduce the force of envy. - Jean de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (ca. 1675) We speak in the presence of people who are vain, just like ourselves, and their vanity suffers in proportion as ours is satisfied. - Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (1734) The best swimmers are oftenest drowned. - Thomas Fuller (1732) In vain sedate reflections we would make, When half our knowledge we must snatch, not take. - Alexander Pope (1734) Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome. -Samuel Johnson (1759) Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers. - John Mill (1838) There are some thoughts that are luminous of themselves; others there are that owe their lustre to the place they occupy; to remove them would be to extinguish them. - Joseph Joubert (1842) No one who deserves confidence ever solicits it. - Churton Collins (1914) Stupidity does not consist in being without ideas. Such stupidity would be the sweet, blissful stupidity of animals, mollusks and the gods. Human Stupidity consists in having lots of ideas, but stupid ones. Stupid ideas, with banners, hymns, loudspeakers and even tanks and flame-throwers as their instruments of persuasion, constitute the refined and the only really terrifying form of Stupidity. - Henry de Montherland (ca. 1940?) Wise physicians do not treat themselves. - Chinese saying He who does most at once does least. - English saying No one is so busy as he who does nothing. - French saying There is more dispute about the shell than the kernel. - German saying A dog barking at a shadow sets a hundred others barking too. - Korean saying Do today what you want to postpone until tomorrow. - Lebanese saying No physician at all is better than three. - Polish saying Do what you ought, and come what will. - Scottish saying When an old dog barks, be on guard. - Yugoslav saying The subtlest wisdom can produce the subtlest folly. - François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1665) Most fools think they are only ignorant. - Benjamin Franklin (1748) Every age and every condition indulges some darling fancy; every man amuses himself with projects which he knows to be improbable, and which, therefore, he resolves to pursue without daring to examine them. - Samuel Johnson (1753) To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man. - Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord (18___) To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. - Walter Bagehot (1879) I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of them; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first. - Robert Stevenson (1886) The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. - William James (1890) Idiots have always been exploited, and this is only right. The day they cease to be, they will triumph, and the world will be lost. - Alfred Capus (1898) Why want to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for defensiveness and disdain, since incomprehension is after all being alone, while defensiveness and disdain are a sharing in that from which one wants by these means to keep apart. - Rainer Rilke (1903) We must fight hard against the unreasonable temptations to turn against our most cherished ideas, when we see them vulgarized and degraded by belated success. Lost causes are betrayed through cowardice, and victorious ones through fastidiousness. - Henry de Montherland (ca. 1940) You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. - Naguib Mahfouz (199__) Life is like photography: you use the negatives to develop. - Ziad Abdelnour (20__) Arguing with a fool proves there are two. - Doris Smith (20__) One who earns is followed by one who wastes. - Danish saying Economy is a great revenue. - Dutch saying Better to feed five drones than starve one bee. - English saying If you blow in the dust, you fill your eyes with dust. - English saying Strong affections give credit to weak arguments. - English saying A dwarf on a giant’s shoulder sees further than the giant does. - English saying. Best are wide ears and a short tongue. - English saying He who makes himself a dove is eaten by the hawk. - Italian saying Dumplings are better than flowers. - Japanese saying Listen with each ear, then make your judgment. - Manx saying A noisy drum contains nothing but air. - Philippine saying He doubts nothing who knows nothing. - Portuguese saying Ears don’t grow higher than the head. - Russian saying A tear in the Czar’s eye costs the country many handkerchiefs. - Russian saying Where there’s drinking there is spilling. - Russian saying Dreams are dreadful but God is merciful. - Russian saying You have to chew to eat, and have to think to speak. - Vietnamese saying The first step toward madness is to think oneself wise. - Fernando de Rojas (ca. 1500) Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them. - François La Rochefoucauld (1665) Wisdom is only a comparative quality, it will not bear a single definition. - George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax (ca. 1695) Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. - Alexander Pope (1727) A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers. - Nicolas Chamfort (pub. 1805) A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner. - Norman Douglas (1945) Readers and listeners like my books, Yet a certain poet calls them crude. What do I care? I serve up food to please my guests, not fellow cooks. -Martial (ca. 90 A.D.) I have not wished to enrich the edition with any references, as some have desired me to do, because the learned do not need such things, and the others do not bother about them. - St. Francis of Sales (ca 1610) Envy’s a sharper spur than pay, No author ever spared a brother, Wits are gamecocks to one another. - John Gay (1717) It is a great fault of commentators that they are apt to be silent or at most very concise where there is any difficulty, and to be very prolix and tedious where there is none. - Thomas Newton (1749) Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones--It is not fair.--He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths--I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it--but fear I must. - Jane Austen (1814) The true University of these days is a collection of books. - Thomas Carlyle (1841) In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. - Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1863) You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir! - Martin Routh (1888) I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s ghost Sat for a Civil service post; The English paper for the year Had several questions on King Lear Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley. - Guy Boas (1926) Do we want laurels for ourselves most, Or most that no one else shall have any? - Amy Lowell (1925) The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and movement. - Raymond Chandler (1945) The primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted. His duty is to enjoy himself; his efforts should be directed to developing his faculty of appreciation. - Lord David Cecil (1957) Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. - Brian Aldiss (1962) No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. - Wystan Auden (1962) People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. - Peter Medawar (1984) We ought to be prescribed by the National Health Service. We’re better than valium. - John Boon, romantic novel publisher (1989) I don’t think screenplay writing is the same as writing--I mean, I think it’s blueprinting. - Robert Altman (1994) Why have the sciences yielded great explainers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while the arts routinely produce some of the worst writing known to history? - Brian Eno (1995) More sophisticated novelists pile up research like a compost heap, but then leave it alone, let it sink down, acquire heat and degrade usefully into fertilizing elements. - Julian Barnes (2002) Attending the emperor is like sleeping with a tiger. - Chinese saying White ashes cover glowing embers. - Danish saying Enmity of the wise is better than friendship of a fool. - Egyptian, Kashmiri, and Lebanese saying The effect speaks, the tongue need not. - English saying Beware of a reconciled enemy. - English and French saying If you have three enemies, agree with two. - German saying At wrath’s end begins repentance. - German saying The worst endeavor is better than no attempt. - Mexican saying The angry and the weak are their own enemies. - Russian saying Don’t try to help the elephant carry his tusks. - Thai saying Don’t rejoice when your enemy falls, but don’t pick him up either. - Yiddish saying It’s better to be embarrassed than heartbroken. - Yiddish saying It is very easy upon granted foundations to build whatever we please; for according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the other parts are easily carried. - Michel de Montaigne (ca. 1585) Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances, they are themselves a power in history. - John Mill (1835) Every truth has two faces, every rule two surfaces, every precept two applications. - Joseph Joubert (pub. 1838) As for conceit, what man will do any good who is not conceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself. - Anthiony Trollope (1862) Simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect. - John Morley (1903) Bernard Shaw is hopelessly wrong, as all these fellows are, on fundamental things: -- amongst others they punch Christianity and try to make it fit their civilization instead of making their civilization fit it. He is an amusing liar, but not much more. - Edward Elgar (1904) Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. - Virginia Woolf (1929) The basis of all Bernard Shaw’s attacks on Shakespeare is really the charge -- quite true of course -- that Shakespeare wasn’t an enlightened member of the Fabian Society. - Eric Blair (Orwell) (1942) One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence. - Eric Blair (Orwell) (1949) I don’t lack confidence in what I can do, only in what is going to happen to it. - Paul Scott (pub. 1990) Although like many witty men [George Shaw] considered wit an adequate substitute for wisdom, he could defend any idea, however silly, so cleverly as to make those who did not accept it look like fools. - Bertrand Russell (pub. 1999) Wrongs are done quickly, but slow to mend. - Danish saying Experience is wisdom’s father, and memory its mother. - English saying Envy aims at others but wounds himself. - English saying Envy demands more than avarice. - French saying There is not enough unless there is too much. - French saying Evil unpunished is evil invited. - German saying A bad example has more weight than twenty good ones. - Hungarian saying We understand events only afterwards. - Irish saying Since invention of excuses, no one has ever been in the wrong. - Mexican saying Evil condoned is evil consented to. - Mexican saying Every error has its excuse. - Polish saying Only evening shows what the day has been. - Russian saying Error is better than a knowing sin. - Yiddish saying A bigot delights in public ridicule, for he begins to think he is a martyr. - Sydney Smith (1808) Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth. - Joseph Joubert (1838) A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. - Marcel Proust (1919) If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now. - Woodrow Wilson (pub. 1946) The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. - Bertrand Russell (1950) [Lytton Strachey] was, for all his brilliance, glitter, irony and wit, an unsound biographer: he was concerned with effect rather than truth. - Robert Blake (1988) One glibly despises the photographer who zooms in on the starving child or the dying soldier without offering help. Writing is not different. -Alan Bennett (1994) Perhaps the lack of literary inventiveness in modern opening lines is due to the effect of the word processor. When I ran the first line of Moby Dick through my spellchecker, it suggested changing this to “Call me Fishmeal”. - Helen Grayson (1997) What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books. - Antonia Byatt (1995) The first occasion is a favor; the second is a rule. - Chinese saying Bear patiently any suffering you cause yourself. - Dutch saying A fault is sooner found than mended. - English saying Fear is a great inventor. - French saying Rarely does a fight go on after the chief falls. - Irish saying Someone with ten faults sneers at the others for their one fault. - Korean saying Every high fence has a snowdrift. - Latvian saying Fault searchers are the people with the most faults. - Philippine saying What a person finds fault with, he wants to buy. - Spanish saying Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. - Sir Francis Bacon (ca. 1610) Weak men are the worse for the good sense they read in books because it furnisheth them only with more matter to mistake. - George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax (ca. 1690) True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but n’er so well expressed. - Alexander Pope (1711) A splendid muse of fiction hath Charles Dickens, But now and then just as the interest thickens He stilts his pathos, and the reader sickens. - Augustus de Morgan (1865) [Dickens was] the greatest of superficial novelists ... It were, to our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists. - Henry James (1865?) [Wilde] that sovereign of insufferables. - Ambrose Bierce (1882) [Trollope’s] first, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. - Henry James (1888) Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth--the way of art and salvation. - Joseph Conrad (1911) Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking. - George Shaw (193__?) If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. - Dorothy Parker (1937) Even the crowd seems to have been offended (consciously or not) by revelation of mechanism. Of course all artistic work is done, to a great extent, mechanically. Trollope merely talked about it in a wrong and vulgar tone. - George Gissing (pub. 1962) Pushkin has likened translators to horses changed at the posthouses of civilization. The greatest reward I can think of is that students may use my work as a pony. - Vladimir Nabokov (1964) Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. - Vladimir Nabokov (1974) The smashers of language are looking for a new justice among words. It does not exist. Words are unequal and unjust. - Elias Canetti (1978) Every word [Lillian Helman] writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”. - Mary McCarthy (1980) It is not travel that narrows the mind but travel writing. - James Buchan (1990) The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that well-meaning scholars tend to repeat one another. Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect. - Muriel Spark (1992) Fire, water, and governments do not understand mercy. - Albanian saying Fire is a good slave but a bad master. - Albanian saying Fish see bait, not hooks. - Chinese saying No need to blow on a fire burning well. - Danish saying To get fire, look in the ashes. - Dutch saying A little fire which warms is better than a big fire which burns. - English and Irish sayings He who catches one, keeps fishing. - French saying Painted flowers have no scent. - German and Italian saying Stir the fire with the poker, not your hand. - Greek saying Flattery comes from someone who has cheated you, or hopes to. - Rumanian saying One has gained every point if one has mixed profit with pleasure, by delighting the reader at the same time as instructing him. - Quintus Horace (ca. 66 B.C.) A word once sent flies off without recall. - Quintus Horace (ca. 66 B.C.) But words are words; I never yet did hear That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear. - William Shakespeare (1604) Authors are judged by strange capricious rules The great ones are thought mad, the small ones fools. - Alexander Pope (1717) Some books seem to have been written not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something. - Johann Goethe (ca. 1810) For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist [Wordsworth]? - John Keats (1818) We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. - Charles Dickens (1850) Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. - Walter Bagehot (1858) They’ve a temper, some of them--particularly verbs: they’re the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, I can manage the whole lot of them! - Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1872) A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. - Samuel Butler (1912) A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl. - Ernest Hemingway (1932) An artist is his own fault. - John O’Hara (1945) Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. - Victor Klemperer (1946) Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. - Norman Mailer (1964) One reason why women are good at writing detective stories may be our feminine eye for detail; clue-making demands attention to the detail of everyday life. - Phyliss James (1995) He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgement of wise men allow him. - Roger Ascham (1545) The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. - Samuel Johnson (1775) You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry. - Abraham Lincoln (186_) Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. - Abraham Lincoln (185_) Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln (185_) I laugh because I must not weep, that is all, that is all. - Abraham Lincoln (186_) Those who look for all the bad in people will surely find it. - Abraham Lincoln (186_) I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books even though they be not published, I think that I can be happy. - Anthony Trollope (1880) Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. - Robert Ingersoll (1883) Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all. - Abraham Lincoln (pub. 1898) Probably ... the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. - Thomas Eliot (1923) Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. - Albert Camus (194_) [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. - William Faulkner (1950) Ripon [v.] ... literary critic ... includ[ing] all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Pen tre-tafarn-y-fedw (n.) Welsh word which literally translates as “leaking [ballpoint-pen]-by-the-clerk-of-the-bank-has-been-taken-to-another-place-leaving-only-the-special-inkwell-and-three- inches-of-tin-chain.” - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Nad (n.) 18.4 c.m. Measure defined as the distance between a driver’s outstretched fingertips and the ticket machine in an automatic car-park. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Motspur (n.) The fourth wheel of a supermarket trolley which looks identical to the other three but renders the trolley completely uncontrollable. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Querrin (n.) A person that no one has ever heard of who unaccountably manages to make a living writing prefaces. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Ramsgate (n.) All institutional buildings must, in law, contain at least twenty ramsgates. These are doors which open the opposite direction to the one you expect. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Ullock (n.) The correct name for either of the deaf ... tourists who are standing two abreast in front of you on the escalator. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Epping (v.) The futile movements of forefingers and eyebrows used when failing to attract the attention of waiters and barmen. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Stoke Poges (n.) The tapping movements of an index finger on glass, made by a person futilely attempting to communicate with either a tropical fish or a post office clerk. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Sconser (n.) a person who looks around them when talking to you, to see if there’s anyone more interesting about. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Maentwrog (n....) Celtic word for a computer spelling mistake. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Glentaggart (n.) ... When waiting to collect your luggage from an airport conveyor belt, you will notice that on the next conveyor belt along there is always a single, solitary bag going round and round uncollected. This is a glentaggart, which has been placed there by the baggage-handling staff to take your mind off the fact that your own luggage will shortly be landing in Murmansk. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Hever (n.) The panic caused by half-hearing a [loudspeaker] in an airport. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Banff (n.) Pertaining to, or descriptive of, that kind of facial expression which is impossible to achieve except when having a passport photograph taken. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Dorridge (n.) Technical term for one of the lame excuses written in very small print on the side of packets of food or washing powder to explain why there’s hardly anything inside. Examples include ‘Contents may have settled in transit.’ and ‘To keep each biscuit fresh they have been individually wrapped in silver paper and cellophane and separated with corrugated lining, a cardboard flap, and heavy industrial tyres.’ - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) Harpenden (n.) The coda to a phone conversation consisting of about eight exchanges, by which people try gracefully to get off the line. - Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983) If you were a Canadian writer you were assumed by your countryfolk to be not only inferior, but pitiable, pathetic, and pretentious. - Margaret Atwood (2002) To write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it--once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. - Susan Sontag (2001) Taking a thorn out of another person’s foot and putting it into your own, is folly. - Danish saying A fool is engrossed in the beginning, but the wise consider the end. - English saying A young foal and an old horse do not draw well together. - Danish saying A fool is busy with everyone’s business except his own. - English saying A fool asks much, and a bigger fool gives it. - English saying Idle folk never lack excuses. - English saying Busy folk always meddle. - English saying A courageous foe is better than a cowardly friend. - English saying Flies come to feasts unasked. - English saying A fly can drive away horses. - Greek saying A fly does not kill, but it does spoil. - Hebrew saying Fools get praise, and wise men are blamed. - Manx saying The fly that stands on the carabao’s back thinks that it is taller than the carabao. - Philippine saying An obliging fool is more dangerous than an enemy. - Russian saying Fools hope to get honey, even from wasps. - Russian saying Folly is the most incurable malady. - Spanish saying When a fool falls on his back, he bruises his nose. - Yiddish saying Food is cooked in a pot, but the plate gets the honor. - Yiddish saying A fool’s biggest folly is thinking he is smart. - Yiddish saying Who knows whether the best of men be known? Or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? - Thomas Browne (1658) The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. - Richard Sheridan (1781 The Poison of the Honey Bee Is the Artist’s Jealousy. - William Blake (180_) By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves. - William Hazlitt (1821) The highest preeminence in any one study commonly arises from the concentration of the attention and the faculties on that one study. He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. - William Hazlitt (1823) It perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. - Thomas Babington, first Baron Macaulay (1828) The man who sees two or three generations is like someone who sits in a conjuror’s booth at a fair, and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once. - Artur Schopenhauer (1851) Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building; architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) Resist your time [era] - take a foothold outside it. - John Acton, first Baron Acton (189_) Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible. - Anthony Hope (1894) The certainties of one age are the problems of the next. - Richard Tawney (1926) A writer who lives long enough becomes an academic subject and almost qualified to teach it himself. - Harold Rosenberg (1973) Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery, - Anonymous Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you do not like it at present. - Anonymous Natural folly is bad enough; but learned folly is intolerable. - Anonymous Actions are the insipid reflections of our motives. - Anonymous A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef. - Anonymous Cunning is a short blanket--if you pull it over your face, you expose your feet. - Anonymous If fools did not go to market, bad wares would not be sold. - English saying It is easy to write epigrams nicely, but to write a book is hard. - Marcus Martial (ca. A.D. 90) What man have you ever seen who was content with one crime only? - Decimus Juvenal (A.D. 12__) He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils. - Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1625) Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer. - George Herbert (pub. 1633) Those who are themselves incapable of great crimes, are ever backward to suspect others. - François, 6th duc de La Rochefoucauld (1665?) How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning? - Jonathan Swift (1703/11) Advice must descend like melting flakes of snow: the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the Mind. - Jeremiah Seed (1747) Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together. - Johann Richter (180__) There are parts of some books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. - Charles Dickens (1838) Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders. - Friedrich Nietzche (1886?) Fools are proud of their big mistakes. - English saying A fool never knows when he is well off. - English saying One fool can find faults which a host of the wise cannot fix. - Danish and English saying Learned fools are the greatest fools. - German and Italian saying Fools always want to give advice. - Italian saying No one notices a fool’s hump, but all the world discusses a wise man’s pimple. - Russian saying Fools wishing to help are more dangerous than enemies. - Russian saying Forbid a fool to do something, and that he will do. - Scots saying Don’t ask fools questions, nor explain things to them. - Yiddish saying What one fool spoils, ten wise men cannot remedy. - Yiddish saying Fools and weeds grow without rain or watering. - Yiddish and English saying If you imagine that once you have accomplished your ambitions you will have time to turn to the Way, you will discover that your ambitions never come to an end. - Yoshido Kenko (134__) In age we talk much because we have seen much, and soon after shall cease talking forever. - Joseph Hall (1630) He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties. - Samuel Johnson (1781) Nothing ever becomes real til it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you til your life has illustrated it. - John Keats (1819) It does not become an old man to run after the fashion of the moment, either in thought or in dress. But he should know where he is, and what the others are aiming at. - Johann Goethe, (182__) Homer’s Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star. - Thomas Carlyle (1833) When a well-educated young man first enters society he is liable to commit many errors which the world terms childish, simply because he has not yet learned how childish grown men really are. - Giacomo Leopardi (183__) When one considers how much the energy of young men needs to explode, one is not surprised that they decide for this cause or that without being at all subtle or choosy. What attracts them is the sight of the zeal that surrounds a cause. - Friedrich Nietzche (188__) Come-and-go pervades everything of which we have knowledge, and though great thoughts go more slowly, they are built up of small ones and must fare as that which makes them. - Samuel Butler (1912) Just as philosophy is the study of other people’s misconceptions, so history is the study of other people’s mistakes. - Philip Guedalla (1920) One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it better. - Cesare Pavese (194__) The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians. - William Inge (1948) How fond men are of justice when it comes to judging the crimes of former generations. - Armand Salacrou (1961) ...there has arisen a Do-It-Yourself cult, affecting... [life’s] embellishments and enhancements and consolations... Those for whom ‘anything goes’ ... are easily satisfied with mediocrity and by the mediocre... For them, the speech of the illiterate is preferable to that of an educated, cultured person... No wonder that mediocrity flourishes in literature and, indeed, at all levels of writing. ... to degrade language is finally to degrade civilization. - Eric Partridge (1978) A man who has taken your time recognizes no debt; yet it is the one he can never repay. - Lucius Anneas Seneca (the younger) (ca. 48 AD) Economy is too late at the bottom of the purse. - Lucius Anneas Seneca (the younger) (5_ A.D.) Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all, A sting, and honey, and a body small. - Latin saying A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience. - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (16__) Error is none the better for being common, nor truth the worse for having lain neglected. - John Locke (1689-90) They never taste who always drink; They always talk who never think. - Matthew Prior (1697) For forms of government let fools contest. That which is best administered is best. - Alexander Pope (1733-34) Vices are often habits rather than passions. - Antoine Rivarol (1788) This is the way physicians mend or end us, Secundum artem; but although we sneer In health--when ill we call them to attend us, Without the least propensity to jeer. - George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron (1819-24) A good surgeon operates with his hand, not with his heart. - Alexandre Dumas (pere) (1846-48) Perhaps it’s a good thing to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for it is soon ridden to death. - Charles Dickens (1849-50) Vanity is the quicksand of reason. - Amandine Lucille Durore (George Sand) (185_) I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1859) An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. - Edwin P. Whipple (187_) A person often has two reasons for doing anything--a good reason, and the real reason. - James Parton (1872) Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1880) More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much. - Phineas T. Barnum (188_) Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three--all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. - Edward Everett Hale (ca. 1900) A New Thinker is only one who does not know what the old thinkers have thought. - Frank Moore Colby (190_) The race would save one-half its wasted labor Would each reform himself and spare his neighbor. - Frank Arthur Putnam (191_) Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. - Mohandas Gandhi (1931) An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes in the other half. - Alfred E. Mathews (194_) Facts that are not frankly faced have a habit of stabbing us in the back. - Harold Bowden, 2d Baronet (195_) Spend not, where you may save; spare not, where you must spend. - Anon. The worst thing about a fanatical reformer is that he makes the world think all reformers are fanatics. - Anon. An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved them down ’til the average is three and a half letters ... I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents because I can get the same money for ‘city’. I never write ‘policeman’ because I can get the same money for ‘cop’. - Samuel Clemens (pub. 1923) Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively, to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate. - Samuel Johnson (1781) Before doing someone a favor, make sure he isn’t a madman. - Eugené Labiche (1860) Correct your friend secretly, but praise him publicly. - Czech saying God does not pay weekly, only at the end. - Dutch saying God cures, but the physician is paid. - Dutch, English, Flemish, and German sayings New grief awakens old grief. - English saying The great would have no other great, and the little wish all were little. - English saying Forbearance is no acquittance. - English saying God never pays his debts in money. - English saying Grasping everything holds nothing. - English, German, Italian, and Spanish sayings If greatness alone sufficed, the cow would outrun the hare. - German saying When God wishes to punish a nation, he deprives its rulers of wisdom. - German saying A great war leaves the country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. - German saying It’s better to come back from the centre of the ford, than to drown in the flood. - Irish saying He who goes softly goes safely, and who goes safely goes far. - Italian saying Everybody’s friend is nobody’s friend. - Italian and Spanish sayings Gratitude has gone to heaven and pulled up the ladder. - Polish saying The farther into the forest, the more firewood. - Russian saying Everyone fears a goat from the front, a horse from the rear, and a fool from every side. - Yiddish saying If we thanked God for all the good things, there would not be time to weep over the bad ones. - Yiddish saying These heroes of finance ... are like beads on a string--when one slips off, all the rest follow. - Henrik Ibsen (1869) War is brought on by countries who want peace at their own price. - Anon. Find your inn before night comes. - Chinese saying Heat comes to all, but cold depends on the clothing. - Chinese saying A bad horse eats as much as a good one. - Danish saying Accept help from many, advice from few. - Danish saying Hunting two hares at once catches neither. - Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Shona saying After honor and state, follow envy and hate. - Dutch saying A stout heart overcomes adversity. - Dutch and Portuguese saying Horses have 4 legs, yet sometimes stumble. - Dutch, Scots, and Russian saying Idleness is the greatest prodigality. - Italian saying Ignorance is voluntary misfortune. - English saying Lawyers’ houses are built on fools’ heads. - English saying Don’t burn your house to frighten away the mice. - English saying What takes an hour to do you may repent all your life for. - English saying You hunt all day for the one hour lost in the morning. - English saying A gentle hound should never play the cur. - English saying After one hit, the shooter will keep shooting. - English saying Hide nothing from your priest, doctor, or lawyer. - English saying He that will have all, loses all. - English saying Hurried acts are never well done except flight from plague or a quarrel, or catching fleas. - Italian saying It’s better to be ignorant than mistaken. - Japanese saying Without bending there is no growth. - Japanese saying Holes are easier patched than cracks. - Philippine saying Not repairing the gutter means repairing the whole house. - Portuguese and Spanish saying When replete, remember hunger, and when rich, remember poverty. - Russian saying A stout-hearted mouse can lift an elephant. - Tibetan saying When sweeping your house you find everything. - Yiddish saying Hoping and waiting make fools of the clever. - Yiddish saying Hints hit harder than truth. - Yiddish saying A heart is a lock, but a duplicated key will open a lock. - Yiddish saying Invention is the only proof of genius. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) It is the failing of hagiographers or of their heroes, when they annoy us. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) We must know how to turn to profit the indulgence of our friends and the strictness of our enemies. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Thanks to our friends, we do not know how much to value our good qualities, if they go so far as to notice our mistakes. Stupidly, we wish for people who can see clearly our good points and be blind to our weaknesses. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) One can think a man guilty of much harm, and be absolutely one of his friends: for we well know that the most honest folk have their failings, whereas one strongly assumes the contrary; and we are not so refined that we can only love perfection. One can strongly vilify the human condition, without being in any way a misanthrope, because there are some vices we love, even in another person. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) Great positive qualities provoke great jealousy. Great generosity invokes great ingratitude. The situation costs too much for us to be just with regard to eminent merit. - Marquis de Vauvenargues (1746) Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et maximes (1746) The kind-hearted become slaves. - Burmese saying To learn to be industrious takes three years, to learn to be lazy three days. - Chinese saying A law without a penalty is a bell without a clapper. - Czech saying A ladder set too steep easily tips backwards - Czech saying No law is better than unenforced law. - Danish saying A good king is better than an old law. - Danish saying Don’t store sausages in the dog’s kennel. - Danish saying Labour has a bitter root, but a sweet taste. - Danish and Hindi saying The most learned are not the wisest. - Dutch saying He who knows when he has enough, is no fool. - English and Japanese sayings A little leak sinks a great ship. - English saying Never too late or too old to learn. - English and Scots saying A broken latch lasts longer than a good one. - English saying The knave thinks nothing can be accomplished honestly. - English saying It’s better to deal with a knave than a fool. - English saying Everyone is a relative of the rich man. - English saying It’s better to be a good keeper than a good winner. - English saying Justice comes before generosity. - English saying Better to lose a joke than a friend. - English saying Little kettles soon boil over. - Estonian saying Knives must be sharp, even in the scabbard. - Finnish saying Beginning without finishing just wastes labour. - French saying So soon as a new law is enacted, its evasion is contrived. - German Italian and Portuguese saying What three know, all know. - Italian and Spanish saying Good judgment comes from old people. - Japanese saying Not all keys hang from one belt. - Norwegian saying Nothing is too far or hard if you like it. - Philippine saying Justice, however deeply sunk, like oil will rise to the surface. - Russian saying If you send a lad unwilling to the well, the bucket will break or the water will spill. - Scots saying Not all said in the kitchen should be heard in the parlour. - Scots saying You lose nothing on a trip by stopping to pray or feed your horse. - Spanish saying Worse than ignorance is not wishing to know. - Woloff saying Where you need intellect, strength will not do. - Yiddish saying He who instals a king never rules with him. - Zulu saying Stretch your legs according to your coverlet. - English saying Learning makes a good man still better, but an ill man worse. - English saying A liar can go around the world, but he cannot come back. - Polish saying Much learning also produces much folly. - Rumanian saying Lend in front of witnesses, but give without witnesses. - Yiddish saying Those who come for the legacy often must pay for the funeral. - Yiddish saying Half a truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin (1758) As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand. - Henry Shaw (Josh Billings) (1865) You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. - James Thurber (1940) The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms ... - Eric Blair (George Orwell) (1946) The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise ... and cultivate the delightfully vague. - John Crosby (1947) The number of adjectives and verbs that are added to the description of a menu item is in inverse proportion to the quality of the dish. - Calkin (recited by Rubin and Mills, 1995) Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. - Oscar Wilde (1892) When there is a choice of two evils, most men take both. - Austin O'Malley (1920) If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one of them is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless. - Darryl Zanuck (1949) In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, most people will choose the worst one possible. - S.A. Rudin (1961) About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time. - Robert Kennedy (1964) History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. - Abba Eban (1970) The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. - Thomas Szass (1973) When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have recourse to any other. - Mitchell Ulmann (pub. 1976) Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut. - Daniel Greenberg (1977) Following the path of least resistance is what makes men and rivers crooked. - Nowlan's Law You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours. - Colin Powell (1995) Nobody notices when things go right. - George Zimmerman (pub 1996). He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion. - Pubilius Syrus (ca. 40 BC) In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur (1854) The effort expended by a bureaucracy in defending any error is in direct proportion to the size of the error. - John Nies (pub. 1973) I don’t act if I only have enough information to give me less than a 40 per cent chance of being right ... And I don’t wait until I have enough facts to be 100 per cent sure of being right, because by then it is almost always too late. - Colin Powell (1995) If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem. - Jiddu Krishnamurti (1980) In Russia, the past is very unpredictable. - former ambassador to the U.S.S.R.

Click for a new quote If this one quote is not enough, try clicking the button below. You will get another quote. And another if you do it again. Reading quotations is habit forming.