Quotes
Quotes about Wit
The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial.
No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us.
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual intervention of civilization.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
Sir Francis Drake circumsized the world with a 100-foot clipper.
We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.
With the Kennedys, the genes are in magnificent alignment, but the stars are demonstrably crossed.
Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
History is a simple piece of paper covered with print. The main thing is still to make history, not to write it.
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.
And that was the way The deuce was to pay As it always is, at the close of the day That gave us-- Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! (With some restrictions, the fault-finders say) That which, please God, we will keep for aye Our National Independence!
The holy man, though he be distressed, does not eat food mixed with wickedness. The lion, though hungry, will not eat what is unclean.
All green was vanished save of pine and yew, That still displayed their melancholy hue; Save the green holly with its berries red, And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread.
I never thought I'd land in pictures with a face like mine.
I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.
