The Last Word

By A.S. Erickson | Thursday, March 1, 2007

Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.
—Dante Alighieri

Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
—Alexander Hamilton

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.
—Benjamin Disraeli

To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.
—A. A. Milne

Patience is the companion of wisdom.
—Saint Augustine

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.
—Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
—Edward Gibbon

It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.
—Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

Faith is a passionate intuition.
—William Wordsworth

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
—Walter Bagehot

There is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
—Evelyn Waugh

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
—E. M. Forster

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw

A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
—Samuel Johnson

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—Henry James

A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.
—Joseph Ratzinger

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
—William Shakespeare

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
—Novalis

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.
—Oscar Wilde

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
—Jonathan Swift

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H. L. Mencken

Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.
—Ambrose Bierce

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven that is inspired by the smell of carrion?
—Friedrich Nietzsche

The Last Word

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