Quotes of the Week

“If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.”

Bacon

“The covetous man heaps up riches, not to enjoy, but to have them; he starves himself in the midst of plenty; cheats and robs himself of that which is his own, and makes a hard shift to be as poor and miserable with a great estate as any man can be without it.”

Tillotson

“The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for ‘the good old times.’ He might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.”

E. H. Chapin

“There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful, as conscience which dwells within us.”

Sophocles

“Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.”

Tryon Edwards

“The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.”

Colton

“Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To be the best in the company is the way to grow worse; the best means to grow better is to be the worst there.”

Francis Quarles

“Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it; that is the right and true pride.”

Lord Chesterfield

“He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.”

Michel de Montaigne

“There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences.”

Miguel de Cervantes

“We must face the fact that big business has come to stay, and that it cannot be abolished in any great nation under penalty of that nation’s slipping out of the front place in international industrialism.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1917). Memorial Edition XXI, 90; National Edition XIX, 78.

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Civilization,” Society and Solitude (1870).

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter I.

“Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.”

Spanish proverb.

“I note that those who are cooperating parts of the whole do not despond; the despised ‘yokel’ playing ball with his fellows in the lot is happier than these isolated thinkers, who stand aside from the game of life and degenerate through separation. ‘Be a whole or join a whole,’ said Goethe. If we think of ourselves as part of a living (no merely theoretical) group, we shall find life a little fuller, perhaps even more significant. For to give life a meaning one must have a purpose larger than one’s self, and more enduring than one’s life.”

Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life, 105.

“A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world; and if, in the present life, his happiness arises from the subduing of his desires, it will arise in the next from the gratification of them.”

Joseph Addison.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

H. L. Mencken, “A Few Pages of Notes,” The Smart Set (January 1915).

“You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man; a contented mind confers it all.”

Horace.

“Knowledge is Power.”

Francis Bacon.

“Learn to be pleased with everything; with wealth, so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for; and with obscurity, for being unenvied.”

Plutarch.

“It may well be that the determination of the government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver) to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. … I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

Theodore Roosevelt, Provincetown, Massachusetts, August 20, 1907. Memorial Edition XVIII, 99; National Edition XVI, 84.