Quotes
Quotes - Johnson
Pity is not natural to man. Children and savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; but we have not pity unless we wish to relieve him.
I fly from pleasure, because pleasure has ceased to please: I am lonely because I am miserable.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
The American people have a right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear.
The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman--and each nation--must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.
We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They are necessary symbols. They protect what we cherish. But they are witness to hum.
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.
The future is purchased by the present.
My most fervent prayer is to be a President who can make it possible for every boy in this land to grow to manhood by loving his country--instead of dying for it.
Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.
He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.
How it pours, pours, pours, In a never-ending sheet! How it drives beneath the doors! How it soaks the passer's feet! How it rattles on the shutter! How it rumples up the lawn! How 'twill sigh, and moan, and mutter, From darkness until dawn.
Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
