Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

In most instances, all an argument proves is that two people are present.

Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on.

Only God helps the badly dressed.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.

Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of the social landscape.

What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.

Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.