๐Ÿ’ฌ Quotes

4,434 quotes from great books

"To know one's duty is of little value unless one also has the power to put it into practice."
โ€” Cyropaediaby Xenophon
"There is no place in our army, whether in battle or in camp, for selfishness or cowardice."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"To sit at home, or come back humbled, or to be a failure simply because some other man is successful, is never to be excused."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"No one can tell what will turn up in battle, and an open mind and a spirit of eager adaptation are essential."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"In life, as in football, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"We drew from the college clubs and from the ranches, from the cities and from the backwoods, and all alike proved to be Americans through and through."
โ€” The Rough Ridersby Theodore Roosevelt
"The state exists to serve man, not man to serve the state. When it forgets this fundamental inversion, rebellion becomes a moral imperative."
โ€” Civil Disobedienceby George Woodcock
"True freedom begins where passive acquiescence ends. To obey unjust laws is to become an accomplice to injustice."
โ€” Civil Disobedienceby George Woodcock
"The history of progress is written in the acts of those who refused to accept the legality of oppression as a definition of justice."
โ€” Civil Disobedienceby George Woodcock
"Violence degrades the oppressor and destroys the humanity of the oppressed; only through peaceful defiance can we redeem both."
โ€” Civil Disobedienceby George Woodcock
"A man's primary allegiance is to his own conscience, not to the shifting expediencies of governments and parliaments."
โ€” Civil Disobedienceby George Woodcock
"The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species... it must be discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Oftentimes an awakening of a state of mind which had been lain dormant, resembling wonderfully that state of moral transition which the renovator of our being hath so graciously staked out for the very adolescence of our Christianity."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of journeys along the intervening road."
โ€” Biographia Literariaby Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must not be as a town planned upon a definite barren site, but as a city accidentally vast, which must be remodeled faster than it can be marred."
โ€” A Modern Utopiaby H. G. Wells
"The fundamental idea of modern Utopia is permanence through change. A state is not a thing, but a process."
โ€” A Modern Utopiaby H. G. Wells