The Last Word

By Kale S. Bongers | Monday, January 9, 2006

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
—Mark Twain

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
—Abraham Lincoln

We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.
—Will Rogers

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
—W. H. Auden

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
—G. K. Chesterton

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
—Andre Gide

How seldom we weigh our neighbors in the same balance as ourselves.
—Thomas á Kempis

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.
—Benjamin Franklin

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
—John Adams

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
—G. M. Trevelyan

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
—Henry Ward Beecher

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
—Thomas Carlyle

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.
—Sallust

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles Eliot

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
—Havelock Ellis

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
—William Borah

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.
—Pearl Buck

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
—Winston Churchill

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
—Montaigne

A weak man has doubts before a decision, a strong man has them afterwards.
—Karl Kraus

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
—Victor Hugo

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
—H. L. Mencken

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
—Cicero

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
—Amos Bronson Alcott

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
—Bertrand Russell

The Last Word

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