The Last Word

Friday, August 26, 2005

Abroad is bloody.
—George VI

What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.
—Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There

They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have a mind.
—G. K. Chesterton

Traveling is one way of lengthening life, at least in appearance.
—Benjamin Franklin

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a free country more especially, ten men who care are worth a hundred who do not.
—James Bryce

Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.
—Theodore Roosevelt

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the chief wall of defense round property and life.
—William Ellery Channing

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.
—Woodrow Wilson
An intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.
—Anonymous

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering.
—Thomas Merton

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
—Calvin Coolidge

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
—Henry David Thoreau

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
—Calvin Coolidge

I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than sit in the seat of the mighty.
—Alben Barkley, last words

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
—Bret Harte

The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.
—James Fenimore Cooper

Power must never be trusted without a check.
—John Adams

Government neither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely it is inevitable.
—George Santayana

Great men are rarely isolated mountainpeaks; they are the summits of ranges.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
—John Steinbeck

Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long.
—Ogden Nash

Reform for its own sake seldom thrives.
—John Quincy Adams

Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.
—Evelyn Waugh

The Last Word

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