Ben Beard > Ben's Quotes

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
― George Washington

“My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”
― Laura Amy Schlitz

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment...But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare

“There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.”
― Louis L'Amour, Ride the Dark Trail

“The size of a man’s understanding may always be justly measured by his mirth.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson, LL. D, Vol. 2 of 2

“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast,
and you miss all you are traveling for.”
― Louis L'Amour

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
― Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the news