Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herbert Spencer

No physiologist who calmly considers the question in connection with the general truths of his science, can long resist the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve different kinds of mental action. Localization of function is the law of all organization whatever: separateness of duty is universally accompanied with separateness of structure: and it would be marvellous were an exception to exist in the cerebral hemispheres.

Herbert Spencer

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Herman Melville

The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

Herman Melville

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

Herman Melville

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

Herman Melville

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.

Herman Melville

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, a rather too scarce a good thing.

Herman Melville

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

Herb Caen

Just two days in Manhattan and you find yourself looking for a place to wash your handkerchief after you wipe your forehead and it comes away black. Is there a dirtier or more fascinating city anywhere in the land? The answer to both parts of the question has to be positively negative.

Henry David Thoreau

What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.

Henry David Thoreau

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.

Henry David Thoreau

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them?

Henry David Thoreau

How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.

Henry David Thoreau

Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate betweenthem. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and either's success would be the other's failure.

Henry David Thoreau

All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet.

Henry David Thoreau

New earths, new themes expect us.

Henry David Thoreau

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

Henry David Thoreau

If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.

Henry David Thoreau

I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

I did not know that we had ever quarreled.

Henry David Thoreau

It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.

Henry David Thoreau

Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusion; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed.

Henry David Thoreau

To be right is more honorable than to be law abiding.

Henry David Thoreau

It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.

Henry David Thoreau

Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.

Henry David Thoreau

The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.

H. Allen Smith

We believe in healthy, hearty laughter -- at the expense of the whole human race, if needs be. Needs be.

H. L. Mencken

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

Jean-Marie Le Pen

There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic.

Jean Genet

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The members of a body-politic call it "the state" when it is passive, "the sovereign" when it is active, and a "power" when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title "people," and they refer to one another individually as "citizens" when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as "subjects" when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.