![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0198601735.02.jpg) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0764917382.02.jpg) Famous Last Words Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0316038253.02.jpg) Stretch Your Wings Famous Black Quotations for the Young
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0965355713.02.jpg) American Quotations An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0198602898.02.jpg) The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0825431573.02.jpg) Last Words of Saints and Sinners 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/1880563053.02.jpg) America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0255365098.02.jpg) The Law This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0316084603.02.jpg) Bartlett's Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0671040537.02.jpg) The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0060950595.02.jpg) The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said Another great collection of stupidity
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0895779250.02.jpg) Quotable Quotes Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0060194111.02.jpg) The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0517682362.02.jpg) 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0842350357.02.jpg) Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0918767024.02.jpg) Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0316082678.02.jpg) Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0813528895.02.jpg) Quotations for Public Speakers A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0780620135.02.jpg) Liberty - The American Revolution This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/B00004ZETI.02.jpg) Founding Fathers The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/068484768X.02.jpg) Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/0684847671.02.jpg) The Libertarian Reader Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman
![](/quotes.nsf/web/img/$FILE/1883011035.02.jpg) Thomas Paine: Collected Writings All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters |
| ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) | Quotes are organized by Name and Category.
Here's the Daily Quotes Log to date.
Cryptograms!
Do you like cryptograms? We've got thousands!
Authors
Indexed quotes by Author or Speaker.
Categories
Browse quotes by category or select from the list below.
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| Lord Acton | Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Lord Acton | Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own
defence. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Charles Francis Adams | Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. Ten years ago such revelations as these of the Erie Railway would have sent a shudder through the community, and would have placed a stigma on every man who had had to do them. Now they merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Society's demands for moral authority and character increase
as the importance of the position increases. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates… to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Quincy Adams | The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| John Quincy Adams | Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Samuel Adams | A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Samuel Adams | Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty! | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Samuel Adams | No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can
any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is
preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant,
and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own
weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Samuel Adams | Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all? | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Joseph Addison | A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Aeschylus | It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Aesop | Vices are their own punishment. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Publius Terentius Afer | Moderation in all things. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| J. Tucker Alford | It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.” | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| American Library Association | The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Aristotle | It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Aristotle | A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Aristotle | Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Thurman Arnold | The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Assyrian Tablet | The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
| Saint Augustine | Near our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit that was not attractive in either flavor or form. One night, when I [at the age of sixteen] had played until dark on the sandlot with some other juvenile delinquents, we went to shake that tree and carry off its fruit. From it we carried off huge loads, not to feast on, but to throw to the pigs, although we did eat a few ourselves. We did it just because it was forbidden. | ![](/icons/ecblank.gif) |
|