Quotations

Here are some my favorite quotes from people both famous or not.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago. . .

- William Faulkner

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine”

- Thomas Jefferson

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
- Harry S. Truman

Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don’t ever apologize for anything.
- Harry S. Truman

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
- Abraham Lincoln

Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.
- John Adams

A person who trusts no one can’t be trusted.
- Jerome Blattner

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
- Garrison Keillor

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
- Philip K. Dick

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

- Malcolm X

“Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything.  They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.”

— Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
- Edward R. Murrow

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.
- Edith Wharton

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. – Thomas B. Reed (1886)

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. – George Washington

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

- Harry S Truman

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

— Dr. Seuss

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

~ Dr. Seuss

“Man must cease attributing his problems to his
environment, and learn again to exercise his will – his personal
responsibility.”

Albert Schweitzer