Notable Quotes
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective,
lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes,
until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong
- these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
— Winston Churchill
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“There are many qualities which we need in order to gain success,
but the three above all—for the lack of which no brilliancy and no genius can atone
—are Courage, Honesty and Common Sense.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things.
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.”
— Umberto Eco
“Appalling hubris is the stock-in-trade of the political class.”
— James Fenimore Cooper, 1838
“People crushed by laws have no hope but to evade power.
If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law;
and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.”
— Edmund Burke, Irish Statesman 1729–1797
“The graveyards of Paris are filled with indispensable men.”
— Charles de Gaulle
“Self-preservation is the first instinct of Nature,
and therefore any state of society in which the sword is all the time suspended over the heads of people
must at last become intolerable.”
— James Buchanan,
15th President 1791 – 1868
“It is important that we know where we come from,
because if you do not know where you come from,
then you don’t know where you are,
and if you don’t know where you are,
then you don’t know where you are going.
And if you don’t know where you are going, you’re probably going wrong.”
— Sir Terry Pratchett
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.
It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
— Winston Churchill
“All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment,
every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.”
— Edmund Burke