Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

Charles Caleb Colton

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.

Charles Caleb Colton

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Wars are to the body politic, what drams are to the individual. There are times when they may prevent a sudden death, but if frequently resorted to, or long persisted in, they heighten the energies only to hasten the dissolution.

Charles Dickens

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Charles Dickens

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.

Charles Stross

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?

Charles Stross

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

Abraham Lincoln

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

Abraham Lincoln

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.

Abraham Lincoln

The Almighty has His own purposes.

Abraham Lincoln

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty

Abraham Lincoln

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Robert E. Lee

My trust is in the mercy and wisdom of a kind Providence, who ordereth all things for our good.

Robert E. Lee

I can only say that I am nothing but a poor sinner, trusting in Christ alone for salvation.

Charles Dickens

At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

Charles Dickens

The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets.

David Brenner

I want my tombstone to read: If this is a joke, I don't get it.

Earl Weaver

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

Eliza Coupe

I cannot feel my legs from the waist down any longer. But who cares? I look good and that's all that matters. And when I die of hypothermia for wearing formal shorts in winter, tell them to put that on my tombstone.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Agnes de Mille

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.