Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .

To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.

Journalism consists largely in saying 'Lord Jones died' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.

I realized that ritual will always mean throwing away something; Destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to close it again on something solid.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, ''Keep tomorrow dark,'' and which is also named ''Cheat the Prophet.'' The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.