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.

Charles Dickens

Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.

Charles Caleb Colton

In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water.

Charles Caleb Colton

The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Charles Caleb Colton

The code of poor laws has at length grown up into a tree, which, like the fabulous Upas, overshadows and poisons the land; unwholesome expedients were the bud, dilemmas and depravities have been the blossom, and danger and despair are the bitter fruit.

Charles Caleb Colton

If we trace the history of most revolutions, we shall find that the first inroads upon the laws have been made by the governors, as often as by the governed.

Charles Caleb Colton

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

Charles Dickens

You hear, Eugene?' said Lightwood over his shoulder. 'You are deeply interested in lime.' 'Without lime,' returned that unmoved barrister at law, 'my existence would be unilluminated by a ray of hope.

Charles Dickens

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

Charles Dickens

The law is an ass, an idiot.

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.