WIST

Force can command obedience, but prestige removes even the idea of disobedience.

Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
Aphorisms of Present Times, 1.8 (1913) [tr. Widener (1979)]

The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have an opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are a few owners, or, as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that truth becomes illusive and the light fails.

E.B. White (1899-1985) American author, critic, humorist [Elwyn Brooks White]
Letter to W. B. Jones (30 Jan 1976)

The second office of the government is honorable and easy, the first is but a splendid misery.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) US President (1801-09)
Letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797)
Referring to the Vice-presidency and the Presidency.

There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out.

Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) US Supreme Court Justice
“The Task of Maintaining Our Liberties: The Role of the Judiciary”, 39 A.B.A. J. 961 (1953)

It is easier to be generous than to be just.

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897-1945) Rumanian-English writer
Haven (1951)

The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) American novelist
“On the Press,” The American Democrat (1838)

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (15 Jun 1936)
Full text.

The red light is always longer than the green light.

Lawrence J. Peter (1919-1990) American educator, management theorist
Peter’s People, ch. 8, “Peter’s Theory of Relativity” (1979)

REARDON: That’s one thing I’ve learned about clients. Dead ones don’t pay their bills.

Steve Martin (b. 1945) American comedian
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) [with Carl Reiner, George Gipe]

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

William James (1842-1910) American psychologist and philosopher
“The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884)

No pain, no palm;
No thorns, no throne;
No gall, no glory;
No cross, no crown.

William Penn (1644-1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, statesman
“No Cross, No Crown” (1682)
Originally written while a prisoner in the Tower of London (1668-69).

Every man has a rainy corner in his life, from which bad weather besets him.

Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) German novelist and aesthetician [pseud. Jean Paul]
(Attributed)

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) French philosopher and writer
“Ideology and Revolution,” Studies on the Left, Vol. 1, #3 (1960)

Great riches come to many men by chance.

Bias of Priene (fl. c. 650) Greek philosopher
In Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230) [tr. Yonge]

Of all species of silliness the silliest is the assertion sometimes made that the woman whose primary lifework is taking care of her home and children is somehow a “parasite woman.” It is such a ridiculous in version of the truth that it ought not to be necessary even to allude to it.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) US President (1901-1909)
“The Parasite Woman,” editorial, Metropolitan (May 1916)
Full text.

You can’t argue with a river, it is going to flow. You can dam it up, you can put it to useful purposes, you can deflect it, but you can’t argue with it.

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) American statesman
The Pattern of Responsibility (1952)
Full text.

Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few because the few are more vigilant and consistent.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
The Adventurer, #45 (10 Apr 1753)

I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.

Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
“The Kicker”
Origin of the phrase, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease."

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) Spanish philosopher and writer [Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo]
The Tragic Sense of Life [Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida], ch. 5 “The Rationalist Dissolution” (1913) [tr. Flitch (1921)]
Full text.

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.

Henry James (1843-1916) American writer
The Portrait of a Lady, ch. 42 (1881)

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) American political philosopher and writer
Common Sense (1776)

It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember I am the Pope.

Pope John XXIII (1881-1963) Pontiff (1958-63) [Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli]
(Attributed)

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends … That if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1900-1965) American politician
Speech, Fresno (19 Sep 1952)
A favorite quip of Stevenson's.

That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The New Industrial State, ch. 12, sec. 1, (1967)

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman and reformer
“I Have a Dream,” speech, Washington, DC (28 Aug 1963)

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery fo fear — not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Pudd’nhead Wilson, ch. 12 (1894)

In battle nothing is ever as good or bad as the first reports of excited men would have it.

William Joseph "Bill" Slim, Viscount Slim (1891-1970) British military commander and politician
Unofficial History, ch. 6 (1959)

All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) US President (1963-69)
Speech before Congress (27 Nov 1963)
Five days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.

Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) US Supreme Court Justice
Speech, Second Annual Conference of United States Attorneys (1 Apr 1940)

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897-1945) Rumanian-English writer
Haven (1951)