Nations' History of Quotes
One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.
- Unknown
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious... they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
- Aristotle
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
- Elbert Hubbard
"It's the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles."
- Claude M. Bristol
"Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance."
- Anthony J. D'Angelo
"And stand together, and yet not too near together. For even the pillars of the temple must stand apart; and the oak tree and the cypress will not grow in each other's shadow."
- Khalil Gibran
"Fools look to tomorrow; wise men use tonight."
- Scottish Proverb
"I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own."
- H. G. Wells
"Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance, but lost time is gone forever."
- Samuel Smiles
"The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!"
- Edward Payson Powell
"Just as your fortune depends upon how your money is invested, so the success of your life depends upon how your time is invested."
- Leone Kester
"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery."
- H. G. Wells
"No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam."
- Charles Lamb
"Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go."
- Brooks Atkinson
"New Year's Day is every man's birthday."
- Charles Lamb
"Trial by jury must and shall be preserved! Amidst the throng of crude sacrilegisms . . . that assail us nowadays in the legal sanctuary, none is more shortsighted, none more dangerous, than the proposal to abolish trial by jury."
- John Henry Wigmore (1925)
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
- Plato
"Trial by jury is essentially a child of freedom. . . . It is the greatest safeguard of liberty, and the greatest protector of its privileges."
- Sam M. Wolfe, A Defense of the Jury (1911)
"All attempts to tinker or tamper with trial by jury in civil causes should be discouraged as disastrous to the public welfare."
- ABA President Joseph Coate (1898)
"Trial by jury is part of that bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation."
- Thomas Jefferson (1801)
"Law and justice are from time to time inevitably in conflict. . . . The jury . . . adjusts the general rule of law to the justice to the particular case. Thus the odium of inflexible rules of law is avoided, and popular satisfaction is preserved . . . That is what jury trial does. It supplies that flexibility of legal rules which is essential to justice and popular contentment."
- John Henry Wigmore (1929)
"Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty."
- John Adams (1774)
"The jury system is the handmaid of freedom. It catches and takes on the spirit of liberty, and grows and expands with the progress of constitutional government. Rome, Sparta and Carthage fell because they did not know it, let not England and America fall because they threw it away."
- Charles S. May (1875)
"The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention . . . concur . . . in the value they set upon the trial by jury; the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government."
- Alexander Hamilton (1788)
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
- Patrick Henry (March 23, 1775)
". . . Trial by jury cannot be corrupted unless the whole body of the people be corrupt. . . . Instances of perverse or dishonest verdicts there will be, because the attribute of perfection does not belong to any human institution. . . . [Reformers] see only those blemishes which are the casual specks of a glorious institution."
- J. Sydney Taylor (1838)
"Trial by jury must be preserved. It is the best system ever invented for a free people in the world's history."
- John Henry Wigmore (1929)
"Illegitimate and unconstitutional practices get their footing . . . by silent approaches and slight deviations from legal modes of procedure . . . It is [our] duty . . . to be watchful for the constitutional rights of the citizen, and against any stealthy encroachments thereon . . ."
- Justice Bradley, (1886)
"Trial by jury is part of the bright constellation which leads to peace, liberty and safety."
- President Thomas Jefferson (1801)
"The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors . . . are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial."
- John Henry Wigmore (1924)
"The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power . . . "
- Thomas Paine (1777)
"We may never have tyrants, . . . but if we should have them, they will seek to accomplish the downfall of free government, not by directly overriding the Constitution, but by using the forms of law to strangle and subvert its spirit."
- Charles S. May (1875)
"No single institution that the wisdom of man has ever devised is so well calculated to preserve a people free, or make them so, as trial by jury."
- J. Sydney Taylor (1838)
"Trial by jury must be preserved: not as a mere formality, stripped of its discretion by arbitrary and inflexible rules dictated by the captains of commerce and industry for the furtherance of their own selfish interest, but free to search out and find the truly essential justice of each individual case."
- J. Kendall Few, In Defense of Trial by Jury (1992)
". . . The popular attitude toward the administration of justice should be one of respect and confidence. Bureaucratic, purely official justice, can never receive such confidence. The one way to secure it is to give the citizen-body itself a share in the administration of justice. And that is what jury-trial does."
- John Henry Wigmore (1929)
". . . Progress, reform, judicial reform - these are good and admirable things, but we should take care to know what we do in their name. . . . To abolish the trial by jury . . . would be a terribly destructive and radical measure, a direct impeachment of the wisdom of the past and a bold and hazardous experiment upon the future."
- Charles S. May (1875)
"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."
- Justice George Sutherland (1937)
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
- Justice Brandeis (1928)
"We are good friends of jury trial. We believe in it as the best system of trial ever invented for a free people in the world's history."
- John Henry Wigmore (1924)
"The first ten amendments to the Constitution safeguard [those] fundamental rights . . . [that] the framers of the Bill of Rights regard[ed as] certain liberties . . . so vital that legislative denial of them should be specifically foreclosed . . ."
- Justice George Sutherland (1937)
"A page of history is worth a volume of logic."
- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1921)
"But where, says some, is the king of America? I'll tell you. . . . let a crown be placed . . . , by which the world may know, . . . that in America the law is king. For in absolute governments the king is the law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other . . . "
- Thomas Paine (1776)
"[Trial by jury is] a privilege of the highest and most beneficial nature [and] our most important guardian both of public and private liberty. The liberties of England cannot but subsist so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, . . . but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it."
- Justice William Blackstone (1765)
"You ought to be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty; for instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever . . . "
- Patrick Henry (1788)
"The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice, because so long as a case has to be scrutinized by twelve honest men, defendant and plaintiff alike have a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1956)
"The right of trial by jury cannot be guarded with too much vigilance, nor defended with too much ardor. If the people surrender it, their other rights will inevitably follow."
- Joseph Towers (1764)
"Trial by jury is our fence and protection against all frauds and surprises and against all storms of power."
- Sir John Maynard, Sergeant at Law (1689)
"The mountain of so-called 'tort reform' legislation sponsored each year by the captains of commerce and industry is 'but the forerunner of a system of dangerous attacks upon the free institutions and ancient rights of [Americans in order to] rob the people of the best and firmest securities for the due administration of justice'."
- J. Kendall Few (1993), quoting J. Sydney Taylor (1839)
"Trial by jury is a wise distribution of power which exceeds all other modes of trial."
- Edward Coke, Chief Justice of Common Pleas (1628)
". . . They select instances of verdicts of a perverse or absurd character, and present them to the public as specimens of the working of the jury system. They prove nothing so conclusively as their own incapacity to take a more comprehensive view of a great subject . . . Yet such is the sort of logical process by which the deprecators of trial by jury arrive at the conclusion, that the administration of justice would be reformed . . ."
- J. Sydney Taylor (1838)
"Those who serve upon our juries have maintained a standard of fairness and excellence and demonstrated a vision toward the administration of justice that is a wellspring of inspiration."
- U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (1962)
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel."
- Patrick Henry (1788)
"Necessity is the plea for every abridgment of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, the creed of slaves."
- William Pitt, Prime Minister of England (1783)
"Trial by jury is the most rational and effective method for discovering the truth."
- Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King's Bench (1468)
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely."
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)
"Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him."
- 18th century English proverb, collected in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
"The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously."
- Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)
"It is best to read the weather forecasts before we pray for rain."
- Mark Twain
"It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time."
- Sir Winston Churchill
"Of the hundreds I knew, I kick myself for remembering so few. Especially on this Memorial Day when I should be able to remember each and every one. They are the ones who paid for this Memorial Day. This is their day. I will not spoil it by forgetting even one of their number."
- James E. Leiker (Veteran) -- What I'll Be Doing For Memorial Day
"Memorial Day is much more than a three-day weekend that marks the beginning of summer. To many people, especially the nation's thousands of combat veterans, this day, which has a history stretching back all the way to the Civil War, is an important reminder of those who died in the service of their country."
The History Channel
"You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing."
- Michael Pritchard
"As for courage and will - we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead."
- Andre Norton
"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos."
- Will Durant (1885 - 1981)
"Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles...respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law...or, in a word: justice."
- Max Nordau (1849 - 1923)
"America's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better."
- Anthony Walton
"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Parker, Chief Prosecutor for the United States of America at the Nurnberg Trials
"It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it."
- Thomas Jefferson to James Lewis, Jr., 1798
"A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other."
Author Unknown
"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves."
- Bill Vaughan
"And ye, who have met with Adversity's blast,
And been bow'd to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass'd
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury -
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen."
- Thomas Hood
"The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly
to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments.
People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel."
- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694-1773)
"A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."
- Garrison Keillor (b. 1942)
"At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows."
- William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
"Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith."
- W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907 - 1973)
"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
- Thomas A. Edison
"[Here] rests the soul of our nation - here also should be our conscience."
- Caspar W. Weinberger, US Secretary of Defense -- Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, NY Times 11 Nov 86
"To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do."
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)
"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow."
- Edward Sandford Martin
"A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it."
- Harry S. Truman (1884 - 1972)
"It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation; for when you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment."
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
"Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost."
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)
"Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive."
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
- George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1903 - 1950)
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
"The one who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the one who is doing it."
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
- Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)
"The law must be stable, but it must not stand still."
- Roscoe Pound
Introduction to the Philosophy of Law 1922
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
- Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 - 1992)
"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."
- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
"If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old."
- James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881)
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
- Mohandas 'Mahatma' Ghandi (1869 - 1948)
"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 - 1883)
"To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live. To be lulled into security is to die."
- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
"Knowledge is power [Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est]."
- Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)
"Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace."
- Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)
July 4th, 2002
"Of freedom and of life he only is deserving
Who every day must conquer them anew."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
"We, too, born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)
"Keep away from the people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great."
- Mark Twain
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense."
- Buddha
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt, Citizen in a Republic, April 23, 1910
"In the fields of observation chance, favors only the prepared mind."
- Louis Pasteur - 1854
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
- Justice Louis Brandeis
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
- Albert Einstein
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis: December 23, 1776
It's a Party
(Click here to view Slideshow "Eagle 1a" 2.5mb)
October 2001 -- Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar:
"The situation where we are now, there are two things: either death or victory. To those who are fighting and bombarding us, they should understand the Afghan man is a fighter willing to die for jihad."
June 1944 -- General George S. Patton:
"I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country..."
"The tree of liberty, from time to time, must be replenished with the blood of patriots."
- President Thomas Jefferson
"No great man ever complains of want of opportunity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know."
- Desiderius Erasmus
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
- Thomas Jefferson May 27, 1788
"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make good use of it! If you do not, I shall repent it in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it!"
- John Adams April 26, 1777
"For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
- Thomas Jefferson Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776
"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
- Publilius Syrus, first century B.C.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein, (1879 - 1955)
"Wrong must not win by technicalities."
- Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 458 B.C.
"There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking."
- William James (1842 - 1910)
- from Faust -- Lose This Day Loitering
"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or dream you can --begin it! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated -- Begin it, and the work will be completed!"
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Full Text from Faust
Lose This Day Loitering
"Lose this day loitering - 'twill be the same story Tomorrow -- and the next more dilatory; Each indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days! Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or dream you can --begin it! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated -- Begin it, and the work will be completed!"
"Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, - act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"
- Psalm of Life by Longfellow Full Text A Psalm of Life
"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
'Life is but an empty dream!'
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
'Dust thou art, to dust returnest,'
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Finds us further than today.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait."
- Longfellow
"The best thing about the future is that is comes only one day at a time."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Justice remains the greatest power on earth. To that tremendous power alone will we submit."
- Harry S. Truman
"Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility."
- Albert Schweitzer
"Power resides not in he who votes but in he who counts the votes."
- Joseph Stalin - 1938
"Trial by jury in civil cases is as essential to secure the liberty of the people as any one of the pre-existent rights of nature."
- James Madison 1789
"The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes has been devoted to the attainment of trial by jury. It should be the creed of our political faith."
- Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address 1801
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
- Michelangelo (1475 - 1564)
"Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
- Justice Hugo Black 1970
