Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Charles Caleb Colton

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most notorious swindler has not assumed so many names as self-love, nor is so much ashamed of his own. She calls herself patriotism, when at the same time she is rejoicing at just as much calamity to her native country as will introduce herself into power, and expel her rivals.

Charles Dickens

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Charles Dickens

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Alan Bullock

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Alan Blinder

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

Al Smith

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

David McCullough

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

David Korten

We can have democracy and a prosperous, just, and sustainable human future. Or we can have corporate rule. We cannot have both.

David Korten

Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.

C. Wright Mills

Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

Carl Icahn

Im a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.

Ai Weiwei

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Alan Watts

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

Chogyam Trungpa

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chogyam Trungpa

When you drop your unnecessary things, you finally can swoop and fly in vast space. It is so blue, so bright, and so nice, so airy and fresh. You can stretch your wings and breathe the air. You can do anything you want. You have experienced cheerfulness and joy, and finally the bliss of freedom occurs in you.

Dave Barry

Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.

Byron Katie

There is no thought or situation that you can't put up against inquiry. Every thought, every person, every apparent problem is here for the sake of your freedom.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will – that is what we are or will soon become.

Ai Weiwei

The freedom of speech is an important yardstick for a society's level of civilization.

Charles Dickens

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

Alan Watts

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Chip Kidd

Yes, Garnett Grey was an Architect. Were a psychoanalyst to approach him from behind, tap his shoulder, and say 'Humanity,' Garrett'd spin and respond, without hesitation, 'Solvable'.

Chinua Achebe

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

Chinua Achebe

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: 'He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.'

David Mitchell

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime

David Mitchell

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality

David Mitchell

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

David Kim

Our identity was bestowed upon us by God and when humanity rebelled against God, we were divorced from the source of our identity. In this vacuum, work can wrongfully become the source of our identity wreaking havoc on our lives and work. Work was never meant to carry the weight of our identity.

Julie Gerberding

The potential for infecting large numbers of people is great,

Nicolas Roeg

You can't hide in life. We are all being watched by some larger vision.

Larry Ellison

We have no large acquisitions in mind right now.

William Reynolds

We have never seen this large number of people in such a short period of time.

Bible Bible

Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.

Kathy Deck

We know we have the largest properties in the sample and what we are missing is going to be very small.

Ann Davis

Ultimately this is a win-win for TSA in that we are going to be screening a subset of passengers at another location, thereby removing those individuals from a checkpoint line at a larger airport.

Lee Quillen

The plants that are going to be the largest 10 years from now should be the largest ones you put in the ground.

Jack Colley

We're looking at trains as a primary way to move large means of people.

Al Sharpton

Somebody had to bring the truth to the doorstep of this president.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

When I talk about the assets, that was at the beginning of the talks. I was president then. I'm not president now. When I said it, this would be a sign of goodwill to begin the talks.

Chris Christie

Never be easy for any president to deal with any Congress. But republicans got to work together. We got to get things done.

Chris Christie

When the president of the United States says he's going to do something, he needs to do it. That makes not only our adversaries more emboldened. It makes our allies more nervous.

Chris Christie

He [Doanald Trump] had no business being president of the United States.

Chris Christie

The president needs to be a force that is trusted in the world.

Chris Christie

We didn't disqualify Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States the facts of her life and career disqualify her.

David Mitchell

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

David Kay

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

Charles Dickens

I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

David Shapiro

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to assume that their president, hostile to the principles that formed the nation and determined to act with malice toward its inhabitants by suppressing their rights and enabling its enemies to prosper in their attempts to destroy it, must be confronted, a rational response for the nation is to encumber itself no more with such a president and reject his authority and the acolytes who carry out his wishes.

David McCullough

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

David Korten

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Catherine Ashton

In the EU you have half a billion people who share a common belief in democracy, in rights, in the kind of economic life we want.

Madeleine Albright

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Ai Weiwei

For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China's suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs.

Ai Weiwei

Liberty is about our rights to question everything.

Bob Menendez

We should seek international support for our mutual objectives abroad, in promoting freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, and also the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.

Charles Caleb Colton

It has been well observed that the tongue discovers the state of the mind no less than that of the body; but in either case, before the philosopher or the physician can judge, the patient must open his mouth.

Charles Caleb Colton

There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!

Alan Watts

People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'

Alan Watts

We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.

Alan Rickman

If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation.

Alan Rickman

What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves.

Alan Moore

I genuinely like the people I meet at signings or the bits of public talking that I do.

Alan Greenspan

I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.

Alain Resnais

It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate.

John Kelly

I feel like I've been raped. Someone's violated my home.