A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
A politician will do anything to keep his job even become a patriot.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
Bore: n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.
I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.
I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.
I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or "structuralism," I reach for my buck knife.
I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
I want a break-in ... I want the Brookings safe cleaned out. And have it cleaned out in a way that makes somebody else look bad.
If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.
If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
It is well not to lend too easy an ear to accusations.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could heed meand ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen 'em mos' all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard and ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head what they call it? Intellect. That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or nigger's rights ... Then that little man in black there, he say women can't have as much rights as man, cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.
Our model presents features that seem to differ from widely accepted...opinion. It does not give to prosperity and recession...the welfare connotations which public opinion [typically] attaches to them. Commonly, prosperity is associated with social well-being, and recession with a falling standard of life. In our picture, they are not, and there is even an implication to the contrary.
Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
The long files of dock labourers carrying on their backs hundreds of tons of grain to fill the iron bellies of the ships in order that they themselves might earn a few pounds of this grain to fill their own stomachs, looked so droll that they brought tears to one's eyes. The contrast between these tattered, perspiring men, benumbed with weariness, turmoil and heat, and the mighty machines glistening in the sun, the machines which these men had made, and which, after all is said and done, were set in motion not by steam, but by the blood and sinew of those who had created them this contrast constituted an entire poem of cruel irony.
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
The really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.
To refuse graciously is to confer a favor.
We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.
What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of the gods. You might decide that Marduk and Zeus were really the same. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis.
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities. Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
