Lance > Lance's Quotes

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

[misquote of a letter about wine, see quotes/831031]”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

“Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.”
― Mark Twain

“Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.”
― Lou Holtz

“You'll never get ahead of anyone as long as you try to get even with him.”
― Lou Holtz

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey

“Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”
― Edward Abbey

“Only the Jew knew that by an able and persistent use of propaganda heaven itself can be presented to the people as if it were hell and, vice versa, the most miserable kind of life can be presented as if it were paradise. The Jew knew this and acted accordingly. But the German, or rather his Government, did not have the slightest suspicion of it. During the War the heaviest of penalties had to be paid for that ignorance.

-- Mein Kampf, Chapter 10”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”
― Adolf Hitler

“The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”
― Adolf Hitler

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
― Anonymous

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
― Emma Goldman

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

[Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“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

“I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship, may be sought and cultivated by all. It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better. Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
― Thomas Jefferson