It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. |
Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. |
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board. |
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. |
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can. |
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. |
Often, the surest way to convey information is to tell the strict truth. |
Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it. |
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. |
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. |
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. |
How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better. |
I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition... (more) |
Travel is lethal to prejudice. |
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. |
The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise. |
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. |
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. |
There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress. |
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. |
