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There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
Booker T. Washington1856–1915
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
Booker T. Washington1856–1915An Address on Abraham Lincoln before the Republican Club of New York City (12 February 1909)
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
Booker T. Washington1856–1915“Democracy and Education”, address at the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York (30 September 1896)
It is better to be alone than in bad company.
George Washington1732–1799
I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.
George Washington1732–1799
So far as I am acquainted with the principles & Doctrines of Free Masonry, I conceive it to be founded in benevolence and to be exercised only for the good of mankind.
George Washington1732–1799Draft of a letter to the Grand Lodge of Free Masons of the State of Maryland (8 November 1798)
It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.
Alan Watts1915–1973The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
- Change
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Alan Watts1915–1973The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), p. 32
- Change
- Happiness
If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
John Wayne1907–1979
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving that upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
Daniel Webster1782–1852
I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned.
Daniel Webster1782–1852
Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
Daniel Webster1782–1852On the Agriculture of England (1840), p. 457
What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.
Simone Weil1909–1943“Human Personality” (1943), in Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986), p. 59
You know what the fellow said: In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love⁠—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles1915–1985Lines attributed to Welles as the character Harry Lime in the film The Third Man (1949).
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.
H. G. Wells1866–1946The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 19
- Change
- Nature