SimplyNeo Quotes

The inventor of their heaven empties into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be “brothers”; they have to mix together, pray together, harp together, hosannah together–whites, niggers, Jews, everybody–there’s no distinction. Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

The government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates–1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

Make it a point to do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959

Always do right–this will gratify some and astonish the rest.

message to Young People’s Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York, February 16, 1901

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.