Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Journal #14

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.”
― Théophile Gautier

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
― John Philpot Curran

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”
― Woody Allen

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
― Gerald R. Ford

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“...vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

{Letter to celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December, 1813}”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“May it [American independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately... These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

[Letter to Roger C. Weightman on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 24 June 1826. This was Jefferson's last letter]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“The constitution shall never be construed...to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
― Alexander Hamilton