Henry David Thoreau

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Dean Rusk

Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two thirds is up to something.

H L Mencken

The impulse to create beauty is rather rare in literary men. Far ahead of it comes the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning to make a noise.

Winston Churchill

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

Samuel Johnson

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

St Basil of Caesarea

And for those also, Dear Lord, the humble beasts, who with us bear the burden and heat of the day, and offer their guileless lives for the well being of their country, we supplicate thy great tenderness of heart for thou hast promised to save both man and beast. And great is thy loving kindness, oh master, savior of the world.

Carl N Degler

The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.

Cicero

For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well bred man than agriculture.

Robert Louis Stevenson

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of Years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an untouchable brat, well birched and none the wiser.

Theodore Roosevelt

We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

John F Kennedy

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessings and his help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

Elbert Green Hubbard

There is something that is much more scare, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Georges Clemenceau

When a man ask himself what is meant by action he proves that he is not a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be some what in sane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking