Independence Day Quotes, Aphorisms, Ideas and Thoughts by Famous Authors, Writers and Politicians on the American Independence Day holiday and celebrations.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
Thomas Jefferson

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?
Mahatma Gandhi

Do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity, the Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
Thomas Paine

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Benjamin Franklin

Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us; to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.
Abraham Lincoln

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.
Abraham Lincoln

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.
Nelson Mandela

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner

The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.
Robert Kennedy

Liberty is maintained by responsible freedom.
Roger W Hancock

Your freedom is brought to you courtesy of the outstanding Men and Women who serve and have served this country with honor, dedication, pride and sacrifice!
Nishan Panwar

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.
Marquis de Lafayette

This Independence Day, remind us that we have the freedom to become more culturally competent and free for business, finance and social human sake.
Carl William Brown

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus

In the summer of 1776 our Founding Fathers sought to secure our independence and the liberties that remain the foundation of our nation today.
Doc Hastings

God give us peace without peace we are without freedom.
Ellen J. Barrier

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
Khalil Gibran

Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
Louis Brandeis

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Simone Weil

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Ronald Reagan

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy

Independence doesn’t mean you decide the way you want.
Stephen Breyer

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Samuel Adams

Let freedom never perish in your hands.
Joseph Addison

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
John F. Kennedy

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.
John F. Kennedy

Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity; while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Freedom lies in being bold.
Robert Frost

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.
Bob Marley

Freedom is never given; it is won.
A. Philip Randolph

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Thomas Jefferson

Enjoy the peace your valor won. Let independence be our boast, Ever mindful what it cost; Ever grateful for the prize, Let its altar reach the skies!
Joseph Hopkinson

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela

Independence means enjoying freedom and empowering others too to let them do so.
Vikrmn

You can also read:

Independence Day

Juneteenth or Freedom Day

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Essays with quotes

Thoughts and reflections

News and events

Quotes and aphorisms on religion, great words of wisdom and different opinions by various authors on the most important social phenomenon of the world culture.

A nation that displays the shitty faces of poor religious idiots on the walls of its cities must by strict logic necessarily be destroyed, never mind the international law of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.
Louis Aragon

In the past, to subjugate the people, the powerful used force, laws and religion; now, they also have football and television.
Carl William Brown

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold

There is a world of practical religion in simply being considerate of others.
Roger Babson

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
Francis Bacon

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin

Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce

My poor are my best patients. God pays for them.
Herman Boerhaave

Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I coined a synonym for syncretism, namely syncretinism.
Carl William Brown

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
Phillips Brooks

And lips say “God be pitiful,” who never said, “God be praised.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.
Patrick Buchanan

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.
Edmund Burke

One gives praise to God not only through prayers of thanksgiving, but also through obedience to His commandments and service to others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves.
George H. Bush )

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day…
Lord Byron

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

If religion is only human, and its form is man’s form, it follows that everything in religion is true.
Emile Auguste Chartier

Nowadays, besides being corrupted by stupidity, the Vatican is corrupted by syncretinism.
Carl William Brown

Religion! What treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!
William Cowper

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.
Benjamin Disraeli

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Serving God is doing good to man. But praying is thought an easier service and is therefore more generally chosen.
Benjamin Franklin

The Pope is none other than the president of that huge Vatican industry that has made the Catholic religion its great consumer product.
Carl William Brown

Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye

Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place – social service – the ants creed, the bees creed.
John Galsworthy

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former — of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen

It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.
Edward Hoagland

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
Thomas Hobbes

Religion is man’s twisted thinking, out of which temples are erected to realize it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer

I do benefits for all religions – I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope

Give us a religion that will help us to live – we can die without assistance.
Elbert Hubbard

The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammedanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
Victor Hugo

Syncretinism is the most updated keyword of the modern catholic church.
Carl William Brown

What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Dean William R. Inge

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James

I have tried to keep things in my hands and lost them all, but what I have given into the Lord’s hands I still possess.
Martin Luther King Jr.

A man with God is always in the majority.
John Knox

Perdition shall be the lot of man, except for those who have faith and do good works and exhort each other to justice and fortitude.
The Koran

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.
Karl Kraus

To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly!
Jean De La Bruyere

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
C. S. Lewis

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.
Christopher Marlowe

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The church burned my friend Giordano, and we don’t forget, we don’t forgive.
Carl William Brown

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.
Suzanne Lafollette

My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.
Dalai Lama

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
D. H. Lawrence

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph De Maistre

Even Voltaire said it: “If God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him!” And that’s exactly what our ancestors must have thought, too.
Carl William Brown

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
Harriet Martineau

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

Archbishop – A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken

Thanksgiving is nothing if not a glad and reverent lifting of the heart to God in honor and praise for His goodness.
James R. Miller

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it, ought to be treated as a common enemy.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind’s disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
Gerard De Nerval

The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.
John Henry Newman

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
Reinhold Niebuhr

There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Sean O’Casey

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. And, the grace of God is the glue.
Eugene O’Neill

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine

If we want to discover what is true, we must be completely free from all religions, all conditioning, all dogmas, all beliefs, and any authority that pushes us to conform; essentially, to be completely alone, and that is very difficult.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.
Thomas Paine

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
Blaise Pascal

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound

A maker of idols is never an idolater.
Chinese Proverb

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.
Edgar Quinet

It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana

It makes sense that there is no sense without God.
Edith Schaeffer

Progressive intellectuals spent decades of centuries freeing themselves from the imbecility of the Catholic religion, only to end up supporting the stupidity of Islam and its fanatical puppets.
Carl William Brown

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
Gloria Steinem

If you have two religions in your country, they will cut each other’ throat; if you have thirty religions, they will live in peace.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.
Tertullian

Call no man your father upon the earth, for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
The Holy Bible

Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.
The Holy Bible Source: Corinthians 4.2

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.
Paul Tillich

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Alexis De Tocqueville

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
Mark Twain

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
Mark Twain

A good test of a man’s religion is its vitality.
Author Unknown

Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God.
Author Unknown

Buddhism believes in reincarnation, but this theory is unsuitable for the wise; in fact, it is better for so many imbeciles to remain in the realm of the dead.
Carl William Brown

Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel.
Author Unknown

Religion is insurance in this world against fire in the next.
Author Unknown

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.
Author Unknown

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike

When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion is love: in no case is it logic.
Beatrice Potter Webb

Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.
William Wilberforce

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde

Don’t try to tear down other people’s religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it’s glories.
Brigham Young

By night an atheist half believes in God.
Edward Young

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred A. Allen

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
William Blake

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
James Baldwin

Humanity’s spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, literary, and sociological beliefs are also very useful in promoting those stupid wars, also more vulgarly called, of religion.
Carl William Brown

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Henry Ward Beecher

The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.
Henry Ward Beecher

Christianity is art and not money. Money is its curse.
William Blake

Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
Napoleon Bonaparte

How natural that the errors of the ancient should be handed down and, mixing with the principles and system which Christ taught, give to us an adulterated Christianity.
Olympia Brown

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s.
Samuel Butler

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Samuel Butler

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity; for the mere pleasure of fancying, I may be damned.
Lord Byron

Christianity is completed Judaism or it is nothing.
Benjamin Disraeli

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Albert Camus

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him… a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The question is not ”How much may I indulge in and still be saved. God forbid! I must rather ask, ”What about Christ’s will and the example I set for my fellow Christians?”
Robert A. Cook

I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion.
Patrick Henry

If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.
Mahatma Gandhi

White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
Nikki Giovanni

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.
Billy Graham

Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion; it is like a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ.
Billy Graham

Christianity is either relevant all the time or useless anytime. It is not just a phase of life; it is life itself.
Richard Halverson

It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us.
Lynn Harold Hough

The Christianity which is shared is the Christianity which is convincing.
Lynn Harold Hough

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
Samuel Johnson

God doesn’t have any grandchildren.
Eli Stanley Jones

Bear the Cross cheerfully and it will bear you.
Thomas a Kempis

The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
Rudyard Kipling

I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else.
C. S. Lewis

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis

Regardless of the day or the hour; whether in seeming good times or bad, the Christian lives in the world for the good of the world and for the sake of the world.
Harold Lindsell

Christian life consists of faith and charity.
Martin Luther

Christians are rare people on earth.
Martin Luther

No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham

A good example is far better than a good precept.
Dwight L. Moody

A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have.
Dwight L. Moody

Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
Dwight L. Moody

There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.
Dwight L. Moody

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that, though it is not true, it has been found necessary to invent it.
Hector Hugh Munro

Christianity makes suffering contagious.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche

What if men take to following where He leads, weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?
Roden Noel

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
Novalis

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell

To be like Christ is to be a Christian.
William Penn

Christianity is a battle not a dream.
Wendell Phillips

Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it – almost none. And when you live it people may think you’re crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it.
Peace Pilgrim

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
Edgar Allan Poe

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw

Faith makes a Christian. Life proves a Christian. Trial confirms a Christian. Death crowns a Christian.
Author Unknown

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.
Francis Schaeffer

Is your Christianity ancient history – or current events?
Samuel M. Shoemaker

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If you make a great deal of Christ, He will make a great deal of you; But it you make but little of Christ, He will make but little of you.
R. A. Torrey

The Christian’s chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
John R. Stott

If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
C. T. Studd

But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.
The Holy Bible

Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, [rise and] walk.”
The Holy Bible

Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out: an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.
The Holy Bible

Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment and its wars.
Count Leo Tolstoy

Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
A. W. Tozer

Christianity, above all, has given a clear-cut answer to the demands of the human soul.
Author Unknown

Don’t feel superior just because you go to church, it doesn’t make you a Christian.
Author Unknown

One ABC of Christianity: “Always Be Cheerful”
Author Unknown

Christian means coming from Christ. Just as a Californian comes from California and a Bostonian is someone who comes from Boston, A Christian is one who comes from Christ.
Don Walk

The fear of hell, or aiming to be blest, savors too much of private interest.
Edmund Waller

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas Ybarra

The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing.
Leslie Weatherhead

The spirit of Christian liberality will strengthen as it is exercised.
Ellen G. While

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled.
Israel Zangwill

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination – everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
John Adams )

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
Robert Browning

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action – that the end will sanction any means.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery.
Thomas Fuller

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Today’s Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.
Matthew Fox

Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it: that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and .
Eric Gill

For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?
Haniel Long

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion. We’re all gluttons for punishment.
Madonna

You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
George Orwell

It is the custom of the Roman Church, which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.
Pope Gregory VII

If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
Muriel Spark

Coming to Rome, much labor and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you will not find Him.
Author Unknown

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is woman being treated either as a Madonna or a Mary Magdalene.
Shirley Williams

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
Fred A. Allen

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God’s work.
Brooks Atkinson

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Jane Austen

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
Henry Ward Beecher

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.
Robert Mcafee Brown

The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.
William Adams Brown

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.
John Calvin

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.
George Carey

People have described me as a “management bishop” but I say to my critics, “Jesus was a management expert too.”
George Carey

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Thomas Carlyle

A church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.
Henry Chadwick

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.
William Cowper

A woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.
Mary Daly

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.
Daniel Defoe

His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his “simple plan,” to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.
Sir Francis Doyle

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
Henry Fielding

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.
Peter T. Forsyth

Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.
Thomas Fuller

Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
Charles De Gaulle

Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.
Billy Graham

It’s about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.
Vance Havner

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave — with both ends kicked out.
Vance Havner

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament, normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.
Vance Havner

What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.
O. S. Hawkins

I’m a priest, not a priestess. “Priestess” implies mumbo jumbo and all sorts of pagan goings-on. Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world – it’s better than being invisible.
Carter Heyward

But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one – pointed – a compass, not a weathercock.
Aldous Huxley

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.
Robert Green Ingersoll

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.
Lyndon B. Johnson )

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
Samuel Johnson

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce

Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.
Martin Luther

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. Mencken

Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.
Dwight L. Moody

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church…is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.
Dwight L. Moody

The Christian church is a society of sinners. It is the only society in the world, membership in which is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.
Charles C. Morrison

The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church.
John R. Mott

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Iris Murdoch

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
L. L. Nash

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.
Edward Norman

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine

My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.
William Penn

Too hot to go to church? What about Hell?
Ohio, Poster in Dayton

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
Ezra Pound

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound

He who is near the Church is often far from God.
French Proverb

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.
Irish Proverb

In a small house God has His corner; in a big house, He has to stand in the hall.
Swedish Proverb

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John Ruskin

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
George Bernard Shaw

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.
Charlie Shedd

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is “I will see you in the vestry after service.”
Sydney Smith

I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sydney Smith

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
John Spong

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift

A little, round, fat, oily man of God.
James Thomson

I think a bishop who doesn’t give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.
James Thomson

One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
A. W. Tozer

A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady’s voice blurted out loud and clear, “Anybody been saved here lately?”
Author Unknown

Sign in lot: Church parking only. We will not forgive those who trespass against us.
Author Unknown

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.
Sir Henry Wotton

Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.
Author Unknown

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share.
Alice Walker

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone Weil

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.
John Wesley

I don’t go to church; kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James Baldwin

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
Jimmy Carter

O unbelievers, I serve not what you serve and you are not serving what I serve, nor am I serving what you have served, neither are you serving what I serve. To you your religion, and to me my religion!
Qur’an

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 % Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.
Theodore Roosevelt

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!
Israel Zangwill

The Christian is not one who has gone all the way with Christ. None of us has. The Christian is one who has found the right road.
Charles L. Allen

Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: “the Son, O how unlike the Father!” First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.
William Blake

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks

A lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” “I dunno… it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.” “We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.”
Lenny Bruce

I love to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe in the earth, there have I coveted to put mine also.
John Bunyan

Each eye can have its vision separately; but when we are looking at anything… our vision, which in itself is divided, joins up and unites in order to give itself as a whole to the object that is put before it.
John Calvin

None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.
Lydia M. Child

The Lord has turned all our sunsets into sunrise.
Clement of Alexandria

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
Denis Diderot

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being… can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.
Henry Drummond

By a Carpenter mankind was made; and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.
Desiderius Erasmus

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
Mahatma Gandhi

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
Mikhail Gorbachev

No man ever loved like Jesus. He taught the blind to see and the dumb to speak. He died on the cross to save us. He bore our sins. And now God says, “Because He did, I can forgive you.”
Billy Graham

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.
Billy Graham

Jesus Christ is God’s everything for man’s total need.
Richard Halverson

Jesus Christ turns life right-side-up, and heaven outside-in.
Carl F. H. Henry

I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if He wanted, but I very much doubt if He would.
David Jenkins

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce

No one else holds or has held the place in the heart of the world, which Jesus holds. Other gods have been as devoutly worshipped; no other man has been so devoutly loved.
John Knox

Jesus says, “I love you just the way you are. And I love you too much to let you stay the way you are.”
Chris Lyons

We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.
Alexander Maclaren

The greatest thing about any civilization is the human person, and the greatest thing about this person is the possibility of his encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
Charles Malik

Jesus promised His disciples three things: that they would be entirely fearless, absurdly happy, and that they would get into trouble.
Russell W. Maltby

I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
Mother Teresa

The word “Christianity” is already a misunderstanding — in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche

A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
Ezra Pound

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.
Camille Paglia

Only Christ could have conceived Christ.
Joseph Parker

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal

God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing.
William Lyon Phelps

Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet – a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Frederick W. Robertson

Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.
St. Francis of Assisi

The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The name of Jesus is as ointment poured forth; It nourishes, and illumines, and stills the anguish of the soul.
Angelus Silesius

Jesus whom I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God.
St. Athanasius

I am pretty sure that we err in treating these sayings as paradoxes. It would be nearer the truth to say that it is life itself which is paradoxical and that the sayings of Jesus are simply a recognition of that fact.
Thomas Taylor

I thank God for the honesty and virility of Jesus religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man’s part in the real battle of life.
Henry Van Dyke

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
James Baldwin

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
Dean William R. Inge

Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.
Wright C. Mills

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?
Edgar Quinet

All of our institutions must now turn their full attention to the great task ahead – to humanize our lives and thus to humanize our society.
James Perkins

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau

You can also read:

Thoughts and reflections on religion

Essays with quotes

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Full Entertainment

News and events

Elections quotes and aphorisms, a collection of great quotations and words of wisdom by various great authors offered by the World of English blog and Carl William Brown.

The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
Elwyn Brooks White

Democracy never selects the best leader it always selects the best liar and that is why every democracy eventually fails.
Plato

Assuming that fools consider the people the true sovereign, and that in a democracy they consider them the true ruler, I remind you that the people, between Jesus and Barabbas, chose the thief, and allowed the Messiah to be slaughtered and crucified.
Carl William Brown

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. 
George Jean Nathan

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. 
Oscar Ameringer

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
Elwyn Brooks White

Don’t blame me. I voted with the majority. 
Author Unknown

Elections are never right or good, they serve only to give morons some power!
Carl William Brown

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. 
Thomas Jefferson

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill

We have plenty of confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our confidence in. 
Will Rogers

Mankind will never see an end of trouble until… lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power… become lovers of wisdom. 
Plato, The Republic

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate? 
Will Rogers

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
Franklin P. Adams

An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. 
George Eliot

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. 
Karl Marx

You don’t have to fool all the people all of the time; you just have to fool enough to get elected.
Gerald Barzan

Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason. 
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

To win in this country these days you have got to campaign down to a thirteen year-old’s level of mental development.
Willie Brown

Defeat has its lessons as well as victory.
Patrick Buchanan

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. 
Richard Armour

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life. 
Elmer Davis

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. 
Charles Krauthammer

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. 
Charles de Gaulle

Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.
Robert C. Byrd

Someone suggested me this definition: politicians, overpaid shit! He might be right!
Carl William Brown

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. 
Alan Coren

The most important political office is that of the private citizen. 
Louis Brandeis

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven. 
Will Rogers

George Washington is the only president who didn’t blame the previous administration for his troubles. 
Author Unknown

Don’t vote, it only encourages them.
Billy Connolly

We have a presidential election coming up. And I think the big problem, of course, is that someone will win.
Barry Crimmins

The problem with political jokes is they get elected. 
Henry Cate

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. 
H.L. Mencken

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo

America: where a little thing like a majority won’t get in the way of democracy! 
Author Unknown

Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
Frank Dane

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America? 
Author Unknown

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft.  Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. 
Will Rogers

I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
W. C. Fields

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. 
Clarence Darrow

Our presidential race is beginning to sound more and more like Harry Potter’s duel with the Ministry of Magic. 
Dave Beard

I always voted at my party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W. S. Gilbert

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be. 
Sydney J. Harris

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right? 
Robert Orben

Truth is not determined by majority vote. 
Doug Gwyn

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it. 
Alexander Woollcott

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election. 
Bill Vaughan

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.
Newt Gingrich

Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize. 
Saul Bellow

Everybody except us is running for governor.
Barry Gray

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is… the ultimate indignity to the democratic process. 
Adlai Stevenson

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. 
Robert Byrne

The election is not very far off when a candidate can recognize you across the street.
Kin Hubbard

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster. 
James Harvey Robinson

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate. 
Frank McKinney

Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
June Jordan

Democracy:  The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it. 
Benjamin Lichtenberg

I have just received the following wire from my generous Daddy. It says, “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.”
John F. Kennedy

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress? 
Author Unknown

A politician should have three hats.  One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected. 
Carl Sandburg

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. 
Emma Goldman

During a campaign the air is full of speeches – and vice versa. 
Author Unknown

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. 
James Russell Lowell

A new poll showed that if the election was held today, people would be confused because it is normally held in November.
Kevin Nealon

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen. 
Author Unknown

If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.
Jay Leno

People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people.  Of course, that is not true.  Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote – a very different thing. 
Walter H. Judd

Elections are held to delude the populace into believing that they are participating in government.
Gerald F. Lieberman

Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. 
Author Unknown

If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.
Abraham Lincoln

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. 
Stewart Udall

In politics women type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets and get out the vote. Men get elected.
Clare Boothe Luce

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. 
Gore Vidal

I offer my opponents a bargain:  if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them. 
Adlai Stevenson

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. 
Winston Churchill

Vote early and vote often.
William Porcher Miles

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Richard M. Nixon

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about “character issues.” Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P. J. O’Rourke

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale. 
John Gardner

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age. 
Marshall McLuhan

There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.
Chris Patten

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work. 
Michael Novak

My opponent called me a cream puff. Well, I rushed out and got the baker’s union to endorse me.
Claiborne Pell

Which one of the three candidates would you want your daughter to marry?
H. Ross Perot

The only thing we learn from new elections is we learned nothing from the old.
American Proverb

The Republicans have their splits right after election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.
Will Rogers

There isn’t any finer folks living than a Republican that votes the Democratic ticket.
Will Rogers

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle. 
Alexis de Tocqueville

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide. 
Meg Greenfield

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation. 
James Freeman Clarke

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names, but are as alike in their principals and aims as two peas in the same pod.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
Mort Sahl

Votes should be weighed not counted.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.
Phyllis Schlafly

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
George Bernard Shaw

Everyone was tired with the old style politicians and their flowery rhetoric. I just told them there are tough times ahead, but that they would be less tough with me in charge.
Anibal Cavaco Silva

Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count.
Anastasio Somoza

The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.
St. Gregory The Great

I’m not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Adlai E. Stevenson

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
Adlai E. Stevenson

If you want to get elected, shake hands with 25, 000 people between and November 7.
Harry S. Truman

Let’s try winning and see what it feels like. If we don’t like it, we can go back to our traditions.
Paul Tsongas

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Theodore White

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams

Where annual elections end where slavery begins.
John Quincy Adams

Suffrage is the pivotal right.
Susan B. Anthony

Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch

Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.
John Jay Chapman

Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
Grover Cleveland

The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
O. Henry

The American people have now spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine what they’ve said. 
Bill Clinton

We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
John F. Kennedy

The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear.
John F. Kennedy

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.
Lyndon B. Johnson

There is no city in the United States in which I can get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbia, Ohio.
John F. Kennedy

You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.
John F. Kennedy

I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. “Oh yeah, well I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!”
Ken Kesey

Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Walter Lippmann

We just did a survey that showed… something like 65 percent of the [American] people couldn’t vote for the First Amendment if it was up for a vote today.
Peter Prichard

Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.
William L. Shirer

Our elections are free, it’s in the results where eventually we pay.
Bill Stern

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau

When a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.
Harry S. Truman

In times of stress and strain, people will vote.
Author Unknown

No matter whom you vote for, the Government always gets in.
Author Unknown

When he first ran for office, he appealed to the voters: “I never stole anything in my life. All I ask is a chance.”
Author Unknown

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal

It makes no difference whom you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
Gore Vidal

Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
George F. Will

Essays with quotes

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Full Entertainment

News and events

Arms and warfare quotes, ideas, quotations, thoughts and short reflections on the tragedy of wars, arms, weapons, military warfare, soldiers and the cruelty of our race.

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
Mark Twain, “The War Prayer”

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.
Charles Evans Hughes

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Omar Bradley Speech to Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1948

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It’s peace that’s wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
Lois McMaster Bujold “The Vor Game”, 1990

The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell.
Hermann Hagedorn, “The Bomb That Fell on America”

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

You’re an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.
Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb

You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Havelock Ellis

How wonderful it would be if the human race, like some animal species, practiced mass suicide in a finally serious and convincing way, not as it has done up to now playing with wars.
Carl William Brown

War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included.
Robert Hall

Any soldier who fights for money and for a dictator is a waste of society, an object without a brain, only capable of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
Louis Simpson

In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant “Agent Orange” are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It’s as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel.
Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79

The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
Albert Einstein

Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument.
James Frederick Green

Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people’s blood.
Lucy Ellman

The unarmed man is not just defenseless – he is also contemptible.
Niccolo Machiavelli

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
Georges Clemenceau

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun’s energy…. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein

War is not nice.
Barbara Bush

If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.
Pope John Paul II

The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
George Patton

All the arms we need are for hugging.
Author Unknown

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
Agatha Christie Autobiography

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
Sir Winston Churchill Second World War (1948)

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
Georges Clemenceau

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stewart Mill

Will… the threat of common extermination continue?… Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?
Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein

Either war is obsolete or men are.
R. Buckminster Fuller New Yorker, Jan. 8, 1966

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.
W. L. George

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.
Walter Goodman

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.
Ulysses S. Grant

The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.
Homer The Iliad

The destructive forces of humanity are directly proportional to the scientific, technological, sociological, economic, political and military capabilities of its imbecility.
Carl William Brown

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
George Orwell

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
Will Rogers

You can’t say that civilization won’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky
Solomon Short

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao Tse-Tung

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
Martin Amis

If this phrase of the ‘balance of power’ is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
John Bright

Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.
Alexander Cockburn

When a war breaks out, everyone hopes it will end soon, the only ones who want it to continue as long as possible are those who died first.
Carl William Brown

At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo — slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space.
Bernard Cooper

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.
John Foster Dulles

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
Hermann Goering

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
John F. Kennedy

I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.
Neil Kinnock

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry Kissinger

The emotional security and political stability in this country entitle us to be a nuclear power.
Sir Ronald Mason

So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.
Ronald Reagan

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
Vegetius

In past times during the various battles mostly soldiers died, nowadays progress has meant that in times of war mostly civilians die.
Carl William Brown

How happy is the sailor’s life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
Isaac Bickerstaffe

Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
Ambrose Bierce

Valor, glory, firmness, skill, generosity, steadiness in battle and ability to rule — these constitute the duty of a soldier. They flow from his own nature.
Bhagavad Gita

The Royal Navy of England hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.
Sir William Blackstone

If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
Rupert Brooke

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.
Edmund Burke

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
Lord Byron

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Joseph Conrad

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Winston Churchill

War is too important a matter to be left to the military.
Georges Clemenceau

The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
Calvin Coolidge

I had rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.
Oliver Cromwell

Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?
Daniel Daly

Stupidity and aggression, selfishness and greed lead to war, but people don’t seem to worry too much, at least until the grenades fall on their feet.
Carl William Brown

I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him, that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there is not any such here.
Sir Francis Drake

Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure.
John Dryden

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rogues, would you live forever?
(Frederick II) Frederick The Great

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
Samuel Johnson

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damn near killed the army.
Sir Richard Hull

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
Samuel Johnson

Now, you mummy’s darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no war, you die with clean boots on.
Gerald Kersh

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling

Rather than a peace made possible by a people of slaves, a war fought by free people is certainly better.
Carl William Brown

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
Karl Kraus

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
Thomas B. Macaulay

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.
Zedong Mao

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He’s the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.
Allan Massie

No profession or occupation is more pleasing than the military; a profession or exercise both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is true valor) and noble in its cause. No utility either more just or universal than the protection of the repose or defense of the greatness of one’s country. The company and daily conversation of so many noble, young and active men cannot but be well pleasing to you.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The army is the true nobility of our country.
Napoleon III

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.
Sean O’Casey

There is something about going to sea. A little bit of discipline, self-discipline and humility are required.
Prince Andrew

An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.
Arabian Proverb

‘Tis the soldier’s life to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.
William Shakespeare

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be never so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
William Shakespeare

History shows that there are no invincible armies.
Joseph Stalin

In a world dominated by stupidity, ignorance is strength and war is peace, as Orwell also said.
Carl William Brown

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.
Mary W. Stewart

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to longevity.
Sun Tzu

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
Henry David Thoreau

That’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
Mark Twain

In this country it’s a good thing to kill an admiral now and then to encourage the others.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: “he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.
George Washington

I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they terrify me.
Arthur (Duke of Wellington) Wellesley

We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.
Arthur (Duke of Wellington) Wellesley

O the joy of the strong-brawn’d fighter, towering in the arena in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.
Walt Whitman

Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
Thomas Wolfe

Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.
Mary Wollstonecraft

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
William Butler Yeats

On the same topic you can also read:

War quotes and aphorisms

War and peace quotes

War the world’s only hygiene

Call me Putrid

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Essays with quotes

Entertainment

News and events

Quotes on war, aphorisms, quotations, ideas, and famous sentences by great authors and writers about the stupidity of every war and the cruelty of armies and soldiers.

Dear William, how is it that there are so many wars in this stupid world? Dear Brown, it’s because peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
Carl William Brown via William Shakespeare

Iustum est bellum, quibus necessarium. – War is right for those for whom it is needed -.
Tito Livio, Ab urbe condita, I sec.

The aim of war is not to kill the enemy, but to destroy his will to fight.
General Sir Frank Kitson

War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood

All war is a crime against humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

Wars serve no purpose other than to fill cemeteries, and there are no enemies in cemeteries.
Carl William Brown

Before all else, be armed.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The essence of the Navy, its very soul, is that it is always ready for war.
Admiral Sir John Fisher

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac… All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting… War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it… Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell

The Ayatollah is no longer here; he has finally been sent to the afterlife; but he will remain a great memory in the history of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The enemy is not beaten until he thinks he is.
Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck

If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.
Frederick II King of Prussia

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir

Frederick II King of Prussia once said: “If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.”. That’s why a dictator who favors war is without brain just as well, capable of nothing, but only of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Bertrand Russell

How wonderful it would be if the human race, like some animal species, practiced mass suicide in a finally serious and convincing way, not as it has done up to now playing with wars.
Carl William Brown

When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.
Arthur Ponsonby

War is fear cloaked in courage.
William Westmoreland

War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.
Paul Valery

All’s fair in love and war.
Francis Edward Smedley

War cemeteries. The dead in war are nothing but advertisements to enrich the funereal marketing of world stupidity.
Carl William Brown

War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood

If the frontline people do count, you couldn’t prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.
Karl Albrecht

War on nations changes maps. War on poverty maps change.
Muhammad Ali

You don’t have to fight too often with an enemy, otherwise you will teach them all your warfare.
Napoleon I

The most important wars in history were the result of trivial causes. Those who know when they have had enough are wealthy.
Fred Van Amburgh

A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Ambrose Bierce

O can’t you see, brother – Death’s a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.
C. D. Andrews

In war, moral considerations count for three quarters, the ratio of real forces only for the other quarter.
Napoleon I

In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
Aristotle

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.
Margot Asquith

A skillful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
Samuel Butler

Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision.
Margaret Fairless Barber

The destructive forces of humanity are directly proportional to the scientific, technological, sociological, economic, political and military capabilities of its imbecility.
Carl William Brown

The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions… one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice… it’s humanity in search of happiness.
Charles Baudelaire

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.
Baudouin I

A wage hike is very hard to take away, but bonuses and profit-sharing can disappear very quickly in hard times… More people are realizing that bonuses look like raises, but really aren’t.
Al Bauman

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
Ruth Benedict

Any soldier who fights for money and for a dictator is a waste of society, an object without a brain, only capable of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
George Orwell

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn

The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.
Friedrich Von Bernhardi

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
Hans A. Bethe

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
Otto Von Bismarck

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!
Alexander Blok

Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.
Phyllis Bottome

Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare

When a war breaks out, everyone hopes it will end soon, the only ones who want it to continue as long as possible are those who died first.
Carl William Brown

For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing, but their fears.
John Christian Bovee

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share in the guilt for the dead.
Omar Nelson Bradley

War is like love, it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize, there stands myself. And what I do not recognize, I shall continue not to recognize.
Andre Breton

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Buddha

How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
Jeremy Collier

Faint heart never won fair lady.
Miguel De Cervantes

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
Winston Churchill

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.
Marcus T. Cicero

In war, more than anywhere else in the world, things happen differently from what we had expected, and look differently when near from what they did at a distance.
Karl Von Clausewitz

It was once said that to have peace one had to prepare for war, but I prefer to argue that to have peace one must exterminate war.
Carl William Brown

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.
Karl Von Clausewitz

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
Georges Clemenceau

A ‘just war’ is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Alexander Cockburn

That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.
Charles Caleb Colton

He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
Confucius

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
Confucius

Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, and though a late, a sure reward succeeds.
William Congreve

When war rages in order to obtain peace you have to fight.
Carl William Brown

I would often be a coward, but for the shame of it.
Ralph Connor

Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.
E. V. Cooke

The giving of blood is imbued with the psychology of peace, for it leaves its humanitarian mark in the hearts of those who give for their fellowman.
Red Cross Courier

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.
Noel Coward

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Bruce Crampton

War eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.
George Orwell

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Quentin Crisp

The idea of thanking staff should mean giving them something that they would never buy for themselves.
Jayne Crook

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
Edward Dahlberg

War is the trade of Kings.
John Dryden

War, he sang, is toil and trouble; Honor but an empty bubble.
John Dryden

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.
Gerald Early

America is addicted to wars of distraction.
Barbara Ehrenreich

In past times during the various battles mostly soldiers died, nowadays progress has meant that in times of war mostly civilians die.
Carl William Brown

Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.
Epictetus

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow — perhaps it all will.
Albert Einstein

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. Eliot

Although I am opposed to war, as we live in a society of bitter conflicts and bitter competition, it is obvious that to change the state of things a mythical struggle must be undertaken, first of all against stupidity.
Carl William Brown

I feel sure that coups d’etat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
Desiderius Erasmus

A coward turns away, but a brave man’s choice is danger.
Euripides

Moderation in war is imbecility.
Admiral John Fisher

We would be cowards, if we had courage enough.
Thomas Fuller

Cowards can never be moral.
Mahatma Gandhi

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
Mahatma Gandhi

Stupidity and aggression, selfishness and greed lead to war, but people don’t seem to worry too much, at least until the grenades fall on their feet.
Carl William Brown

Morality is contraband in war.
Mahatma Gandhi

Cowards are cruel, but the brave love mercy and delight to save.
John Gay

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn

How many joys are crushed under foot because people look up at the sky and disregard what is at their feet?
Catharina Elisabetha Goethe

The coward threatens when he is safe.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted.
George Noel Gordon

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood.
Phillip C. Grant

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
Robert Graves

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace time.
Ian Hay

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
William Hazlitt

War is stupidity, just as stupidity is the existential war of man.
Carl William Brown

Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Joseph Heller

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.
Joseph Heller

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow men.
Napoleon Hill

Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Thomas Hobbes

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.
Eric Hoffer

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
Abbie Hoffman

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
Herbert Clark Hoover

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
A. E. Housman

No man who does a good deed should expect gratitude. The reward of a good deed is in having done it.
Elbert Hubbard

What we believe is more important than our material existence, therefore warfare is a legitimate extension of values.
Edward Johnson

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley

It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.
Dolores Ibarruri

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
Washington Irving

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
Thomas Jefferson

In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it’s largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
James Jones

It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.
Junius

Criminals and law enforcement agencies, a fratricidal struggle, a civil war between rival gangs.
Carl William Brown

The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
Helen Keller

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy

Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!
Omar Khayyam

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr.

And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
Rudyard Kipling

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
Marvin Kitman

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.
George A. Knight

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler

Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?
KaThe Kollwitz

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
Karl Kraus

Sure war is a bad thing, but at least it helps bring down unemployment.
Carl William Brown

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
Karl Kraus

The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.
Lewis H. Lapham

Cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters — not to talk in armies and nations and numbers — but to track it home.
D. H. Lawrence

Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man. That is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.
Frieda Lawrence

I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.
Robert E. Lee

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war –for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.
John Lennon

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.
Abraham Lincoln

Let him not boast who puts his armor on as he who puts it off, the battle done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have known war as few men now living know it. Its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.
Douglas Macarthur

In a country where the military earns a lot of money, the only thing to do to amortize the expense is to generate a war.
Carl William Brown

I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.
Douglas Macarthur

In war, there is no substitute for victory.
Douglas Macarthur

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).
David Mamet

Wars are carried out by large organizations; Peace is brought one by one.
Rachel Manor

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.
Allan Massie

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.
Francis Meehan

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken

God always provides what we need, but we must be ready to open our eyes and see it.
Midrash

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Henry Miller

I’m a hero with coward’s legs.
Spike Milligan

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
Charles Edward Montague

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The only war I can conceive is that against stupidity. But in this area the human race always prefers to be at peace with itself and its deadliest enemies.
Carl William Brown

It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Lewis Mumford

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
Jose Narosky

The only cowards are sinners; fighting the fight is all.
John G. Neihardt

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Our rewards in life will always be in direct ratio to our service.
Earl Nightingale

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
Ronald Reagan

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
George Orwell

What are we hoping to get out of it, what’s it all in aid of — is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?
John Osborne

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Wilfred Owen

To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.
Thomas Paine

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?
Leslie Parrish-Bach

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.
William Penn

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
Edgar Allan Poe

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
Ezra Pound

Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound

There is no reason for war that reasonable men can’t settle. Clouds and thunder don’t always result in rain. A small cloud can hide the sun and the moon.
Armenian Proverb

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
French Proverb

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
German Proverb

It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.
Irish Proverb

We won the war, but we lost peace.
Serbian Proverb

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
Queen Elizabeth II

War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.
Sir Walter Raleigh

By now the cold war has turned into a hot peace, and people have already begun to sweat a lot.
Carl William Brown

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.
Jules Renard

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.
John D. Rockefeller

I cannot believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war and no one will win the next.
Eleanor Roosevelt

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

War is a contagion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.
Richard Rorty

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.
Quintus Curtius Rufus

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
William T. Sherman

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.
Dorothy L. Sayers

God’s delays are not God’s denials.
Robert H. Schuller

When the adulation of life is gone, the coward sneaks to his death, but the brave live on.
George Sewell

Cowards die a thousand deaths. The valiant taste of death but once.
William Shakespeare

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
William Shakespeare

For the humorist, good is evil, war is peace, life is death.
Carl William Brown

Cry “havoc!” and let loose the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.
William Shakespeare

We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.
William Shakespeare

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
George Bernard Shaw

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
George Bernard Shaw

War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

War – what a waste of time. It’s all about great achievements for the very few but hideous losses for the very many.
Author Unknown

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
Sun Tzu

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Sun Tzu

You can ensure the success of your attacks if you only attack places that are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked. Therefore, that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
Sun Tzu

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.
Robert S. Surtees

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.
The Talmud

I have a deep sympathy with war; it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
Henry David Thoreau

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
Alexis De Tocqueville

Not in rewards, but in the strength to strive, the blessing lies.
J. T. Towbridge

Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.
Mark Twain

Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.
Mark Twain

It is better to deserve an honor and not receive it, than to receive one and not deserve it!
Mark Twain

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.
Mark Twain

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Mark Twain

A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.
Author Unknown

As cowardly as a coward is, it is not safe to call a coward a coward.
Author Unknown

All wars are wars of power, which is why being against power and stupidity it is obvious that it is also against the war for power, but not against the revolt against power and its atrocities.
Carl William Brown

Companies that give excellent service reward employees for providing it.
Author Unknown

Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.
Author Unknown

The cowards never started – and the weak died along the way.
Author Unknown

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John Updike

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
Peter Ustinov

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.
Marquis De Vauvenargues

It is forbidden to kill – and thus, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers, and with the background of trumpets playing.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
Booker T. Washington

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Simone Weil

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
Simone Weil

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men.
Bishop Westcott

With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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

All men would be cowards if they durst.
John Wilmot

My mind is my biggest asset.
Tiger Woods

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share.
Virginia Woolf

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Virginia Woolf

I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats

You can also read:

Arms and Warfare quotes

War and peace quotes

Call me Putrid

Essays with quotes

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

News and events

American Presidents Part 2 Contemporary age. The men who made America great.

President’s Day, sometimes called Washington’s Birthday, is an official holiday observed in the United States of America on the birth of George Washington, the country’s first president. This year Presidents Day is celebrated on Monday, February 16, 2026.

We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.
Teddy Roosevelt

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb … Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
Herbert Hoover

Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met — obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.
John F. Kennedy

The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
Richard Nixon

The founding of our Nation was more than a political event; it was an act of faith, a promise to Americans and to the entire world. The Declaration of Independence declared that people can govern themselves, that they can live in freedom with equal rights, that they can respect the rights of others.
Gerald Ford

Let’s talk about the presidents of the contemporary USA since J.F. Kennedy became President in 1960. Every President has some pros and cons both for his nation and for all the world. Here then, is a modern portrait gallery of the White House.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969)

As J.F. Kennedy’s vice-president, Johnson became president after Kennedy’s assassination and after that he was re-elected. He tried to create a “great society” along the lines of his predecessor, but he did not have much success. Johnson’s name is associated with the Vietnam War which he upheld and extended. The end of this war was the final defeat suffered by the American colonies.

Richard Nixon (1969-1974)

Richard Nixon’s political activity was long and varied. In the 1950’s he was Eisenhower’s vice-president. In the 1960s he opposed Kennedy’s election and lost the campaign by a narrow margin. In the early 1970s he was elected president. He was vastly successful in international politics, ending the Vietnam War, and beginning talks with the USSR and China. However, he had to resign as a consequence of the Watergate Aff air (electoral espionage).

Gerald Ford (1974-1977)

He was the first president to release to the public a full report of his medical checkup. Ford was the first president to visit Japan. Ford was the only president whose two assassination attempts against him were made by women. Gerald Ford was the first president not elected by the people to become president. He became vice president when Nixon’s elected vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned. Then became president when tiny U.S. flag Nixon resigned. At 93 years old, Gerald R. Ford and tiny U.S. flag Ronald W. Reagan lived longer than any other U.S. President. Ford lived longer than Reagan did. Ford was the first president to pardon a former president.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)
Carter became the President of the United States after he had been Governor of Georgia when he ran a peanut business. Carter’s presidency was characterized by his support of “civil rights” at home and attempts at peace abroad. He organized the Jamp David meeting where Israel and Egypt signed the peace reement. Carter is still useful to his country thanks to his Diplomatic abilities. He is often assigned the task of peace ambassador to the troubled areas of the world.

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

In 1981 on March 30, Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt by John W. Hinkley, Jr. outside of the Washington, D.C. Hilton Hotel. Reagan’s life is a demonstration of how a film actor can become a president twice. Reagan’s economic and social policies were conservative, the so-called “reaganomics”. It improved the economy but it also created a lot of poverty and homelessness. In the 1980 election, Reagan won in 46 out of 50 states. The only states he did not win in were Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, or West Virginia. He also did not win the District of Columbia. In the 1984 election, Reagan won in 49 out of 50 states. The only state he did not win in was Minnesota, and he lost by a very small margin there. He also did not win the District of Columbia.

George Bush (1989-1993)

George Bush’s political career was very long. He was the first ambassador to China, then the chief of the powerful CIA. He served as Reagan’s vice-president and finally he was president from 1989 to 1992. His most important event was the Gulf War in 1992 against Iraq. Bush was the sixth left-handed president of the United States.
In 1988, Bush ran a successful campaign to succeed Reagan as President, defeating Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency: military operations were conducted in Panama and the Persian Gulf; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved two years later. Though the agreement was not ratified until after he left office, Bush also signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise and, after a struggle with Congress, signed an increase in taxes that Congress had passed. In the wake of a weak recovery from an economic recession, along with continuing budget deficits and the diminution of foreign politics as a major issue in a post-Cold War political climate, he lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton.

William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001)

In 1998 President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The act provided harsher penalties for copyright infringement on the internet and made it illegal to create or distribute technologies for bypassing controlled access to copyrighted material. In 1999 he authorized American troops, but not ground troops, to take part in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) air strikes against the Serbian government. Although a United Nations (UN) courts ruled that a “genocide” was not taking place in Yugoslavia at this time, the UN court did conclude that Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic’s government had used a “systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments” in suppressing the ethnic Albanians’ revolt in Kosovo. NATO forces suffered virtually no loss of life during this military campaign. In 1998, On December 19, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Clinton, one for perjury and the other for obstruction of justice. On February 12, 1999, the Senate acquitted President Clinton of both articles of impeachment made against him by the House of Representatives. The first version of the official U.S. government White House website went online on Oct. 21, 1994. On November 16, 2000, President Clinton was the first president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. Clinton was the seventh left-handed president of the United States.

George Walker Bush (2001-2009)

Bush was one of two managing general partners of the Texas Rangers baseball club from 1989-1994. Of the 6 million votes cast in Florida in the 2000 election, Bush won the state’s 25 electoral votes by 537 votes. On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into both towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania. October 7: The War in Afghanistan begins with the U.S. military operation “Operation Enduring Freedom”, which was launched by the United States with the United Kingdom in response to the September 11 attacks. On March 20, 2003, the Iraq War (or the Second Persian Gulf War) begins with the invasion of Iraq by a multinational coalition of forces, led by the United States and the United Kingdom. Although Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May 2003, the conflict and casualities continued after he completed his second term in office. On August 28, 2005: Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the United States, causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. In the years 2007-2009 the economy enters a state of crisis as the US housing market bubble bursts, foreclosures rise, and prominent financial institutions must seek federal assistance.

Barack Hussein Obama (2009-2017)

Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story – values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. In 2009 in an effort to rejuvenate the struggling U.S. economy, Congress passes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocates money for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science, assistance to the unemployed, and State and local fiscal stabilization. The Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010. Obama was the first African-American U.S. president. He was also the first president born outside of the contiguous United States. Obama was the eighth left-handed president of the United States. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. After winning re-election by defeating Republican opponent Mitt Romney, Obama was sworn in for a second term in 2013. During his second term, Obama promoted inclusiveness for LGBT Americans, with his administration filing briefs that urged the Supreme Court to strike down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional (United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges). Obama advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration. In foreign policy, Obama ordered military intervention in Iraq in response to gains made by ISIL after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, continued the process of ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, initiated sanctions against Russia following the invasion in Ukraine and again after Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, and normalized U.S. relations with Cuba. Obama left office in January 2017 with a 60% approval rating. He currently resides in Washington, D.C. His presidential library will be built in Chicago.

Donald Trump (2017-2020)

Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States. He believes the United States has incredible potential and will go on to exceed anything that it has achieved in the past. His campaign slogan was Make America Great Again, and that is exactly what he intends to do. He was born on June 14, 1946. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality. Trump was born in the New York City borough of Queens. He earned an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A third-generation businessman, Trump followed in the footsteps of his grandmother Elizabeth and father Fred in running the family real estate company. He served as chairman and president of The Trump Organization from 1971 until January 2017. Upon his inauguration as president, Trump delegated company management to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Trump’s business career primarily focused on building or renovating office towers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. As president, Trump’s major domestic policy initiatives have included a failed attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a travel ban on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, citing security concerns. In foreign policy, he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Agreement, undid parts of the Cuban Thaw, and ordered missile strikes in Syria in response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack. After Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, the Justice Department appointed his predecessor Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the presidential election, potential links between Russia and Trump campaign associates, and any related matters. In 1995, he converted Mar-a-Lago estate, which he had acquired in 1985 for 5 million dollars, into a private club. The estate is now on 20 acres, it has an enormous ballroom, 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, five tennis courts, a pool, and a golf course. Today the club has almost 500 memebrs, including many celebrities and politicians, who use the estate as a private resort. Now memebers must pay 200,000 dollars to be in the club, an increase of $100,000 since Trump became president in January, and other $14,000 a year. The club generates tens of millions of dollars for Trump every year, and will probably generate more, now that he’s president.

Joseph Robinette Biden (2021-2024)

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who is the 46th and current president of the United States. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 47th vice president from 2009 to 2017 under Barack Obama and represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009.
Joe Biden briefly worked as an attorney before turning to politics. He became the fifth-youngest U.S. senator in history as well as Delaware’s longest-serving senator. His 2008 presidential campaign never gained momentum, but Democratic nominee Barack Obama selected him as his running mate, and Biden went on to serve two terms as the 47th vice president of the United States. In 2017, at the close of his administration, Obama presented Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Two years later Biden launched his campaign for U.S. president and was elected as the 46th president of the United States on Jan. 2020. His running mate, Kamala Harris, made history as the first woman and first Black and South Asian American elected vice president. Biden will become the 46th president on Jan. 20.

Donald Trump (2024- )

On March 12, 2024, he won the majority of delegates in the Republican primaries, becoming the party’s official presidential candidate. On July 13, he was attacked during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and was shot in the ear by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. A spectator and the attacker were killed, and two others were injured. On September 15, in West Palm Beach, Florida, a gunman lurking a short distance from the golf course where Trump was playing was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of planning to shoot him.

On July 21, 2024, Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement, having already been considered the presumptive nominee before the end of the primaries. Trump won the November 2024 election with 312 electoral votes to incumbent Vice President Harris’s 226, and several media outlets described his re-election as a remarkable and historic comeback.

In his first administration, President Trump passed record-setting tax cuts and regulation cuts, achieved energy independence, replaced NAFTA with the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, invested $2 trillion to completely rebuild the Military, launched the Space Force, obliterated the ISIS Caliphate, achieved a major breakthrough for peace in the Middle East, passed the most significant Veterans Affairs reforms in half a century, confirmed over 250 federal judges, including 3 Supreme Court Justices, signed bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform, lowered drug prices, protected Medicare and Social Security, and secured our nation’s borders in his first four years in office. This was only the beginning.

Donald J. Trump defines the American success story. Throughout his life he has continually set the standards of business and entrepreneurial excellence, especially in real estate, sports, and entertainment. President Trump built on his success in private life when he entered into politics and public service.

He remarkably won the Presidency in his first ever run for any political office. He won a second time despite several assassination attempts and the unprecedented weaponization of law fare against him. Time after time President Trump has defied the odds because he fundamentally believes in the exceptionalism of the American spirit and wants to see our great country succeed.

Presidents’ Day in the United States

Washington’s Birthday, also known as Presidents’ Day, is a federal holiday held on the third Monday of February. The day honors presidents of the United States, including George Washington, the USA’s first president. Washington’s Birthday officially honors the life and work of George Washington, the first president of the United States. The day commemorates past presidents of the USA. Washington’s Birthday is sometimes known as Presidents’ Day. This is because while most states have adopted Washington’s Birthday, some states officially celebrate Presidents’ Day.

Some states pay particular attention to Abraham Lincoln, as his birthday was also in mid-February. In the weeks or days leading up to the holiday, schools often organize events and lessons for students about the presidents of the United States and George Washington in particular. It is a popular day for stores to start their sales. The US federal holiday is on the third Monday of February each year, but records show that George Washington’s birthday is on February 22.

Many businesses are open as usual and many stores hold sales on Washington’s Birthday. Many delivery services, except for the Post Office, have a regular service and many, but not all, public transit systems operate on regular schedules. Some schools close for the whole week for a mid-winter recess. According to some government sources, Indiana observes the Washington’s birthday holiday in December.

American Presidents Part 1

American Presidents Quiz

Full list of presidents of the United States

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Essays with quotes

Entertainment

News and events