Mark > Mark's Quotes

“That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.”
― Christopher Buckley

“There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.”
― Alan Clark

“I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? "Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.”
― Chris Rock

“I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You’re born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from.”
― Edmund Sears Morgan

“The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
― Tony Benn

“If you are cold, tea will warm you;
if you are too heated, it will cool you;
If you are depressed, it will cheer you;
If you are excited, it will calm you.”
― William Ewart Gladstone

“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. ”
― William Ewart Gladstone

“His experience on the bench was crucial in forming Taft's political vision. He disliked the rough and tumble of partisanship; he much preferred the quiet of the study. The image of the dispassionate jurist weighing the competing arguments of the litigants embodied how he saw the governing process. Elections, campaigning, and pressing the flesh were to him necessary evils in a democratic society, but Taft thought that he was a gregarious creature who loved humanity. However, such traits were for the golf course or the salon or the friendly conversation. When it came time to make policy, the ethos of the jurist dominated.”
― Lewis L. Gould, The William Howard Taft Presidency

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“There are moments in which stupid people say clever things, obtuse people say sharp things, and good-natured people say ill-natured things.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Duke's Children

“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
― John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”
― John W. Campbell Jr.

“It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret.”
― David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59

“What's experience got to do with anything? Experience just gives us anecdotal evidence for our personal prejudices. Trainables operate on a wider database.”
― Crawford Kilian, The Fall of the Republic

“Patriotism was a fool's religion, a crude social bonding device that defeated itself by inciting violence and inviting reprisal.”
― Crawford Kilian, The Fall of the Republic

“Attempting to resolve questions of interpretation by deferring to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution leads to several practical and philosophical difficulties. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was not written by one person but was arrived at through a process of debate, politicking, and compromise. It may be that the various participants in that process had different intentions about what the amendment should mean and how it should be implemented; those intentions may even have been contradictory. Moreover, some would argue that even if the Constitution had one author with one coherent intention as to its meaning and future implementation, that intention could never be completely accessible to judges, or even historians, two centuries later. Finally, assuming for the sake of argument that the Constitutions; Framers did have a unitary, discoverable intention as to how it should be implemented in a particular case, it is not clear that that intention should necessarily govern constitutional interpretation in the late twentieth century, a profoundly different time and society from that of the Framers. The Constitution endures because it is a vehicle for the most central values of American society; but those values necessarily evolve as society changes.”
― Morton J. Horwitz

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.”
― Joyce Appleby

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein

“It was indeed the transcendent force of modernization that accounts for the unparalleled strength of Know-Nothingism in Massachusetts. The political fallout from the pressures of modernization, however, included more than the backlash of the native-born majority against immigrants, Catholics, and the South that most historians perceive as the essence of Know-Nothingism. Explosive urban and industrial growth had thrust the Commonwealth into the forefront of the industrial states in the antebellum period, creating, in the process, wrenching social and economic dislocations. The failure of the established parties to mount a significant response to the myriad issues and problems spawned in the matrix of modernization weakened partisan attachments and set the rank and file of the established parties on a quest for a political vehicle that would make a difference in their lives. In 1854, such a vehicle materialized in the form of an antiparty, antipolitician populist movement that promised to cleanse the statehouse of corrupt old parties and self-serving political careerists and turn the government over to the people so that they might right the wrongs that had for so long afflicted them. Among the afflictions, it is true, were the many social problems associated with mass immigration; but there were other troubling and pervasive concerns endemic to an unharnessed, rapidly expanding urban, industrial order, including the tyrannical factory system, the decline in the status of labor, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the deteriorating quality of urban life.”
― John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party In Massachusetts: The Rise And Fall Of A People's Movement

“The loss of the greater part of the American empire in the twenties had left no psychological scar, for it was lost in a civil war, of metropolitan against colonial Spaniards. Cuba was wrenched from Spain by defeat at the hands of a foreign power her press had taught her to despise as a nation of vulgar meat-vendors or to fear as a Colossus. It was the public destruction of the image of Spain as a great power which turned defeat into moral disaster.”
― Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808-1975

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I thought that if people could lie about me, why would they not lie about issues where there was a lot more at stake?”
― Reham Khan, Reham Khan

“[Samuel] Gompers saw as few others did that in America labor must shape itself to the contours of its society rather than try to remake society. He realized that Americans workers endorsed principles that they carried with them everywhere, even to work. Donning overalls wrought no magic transformation of the multifaceted work force into a single-minded body. To succeed, any labor movement would have to take the workers as they came, accept their principles, and weave them into a whole fabric.”
― Harold C. Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America

“The short-lived Confederate States of America was a signal event in the history of the Western world. What secessionists set out to build was something entirely new in the history of nations: a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.”
― Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South