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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (7,905)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,029)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,950)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,116)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,889)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,289)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 26-Jan-21 - Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #4214 (1732) | WIST on Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #3366 (1732).
- 26-Jan-21 - Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, # 241 (1732) | WIST on A Collection of English Proverbs (1678).
- 26-Jan-21 - Horrified Magazine - The British Horror Website on “Writing the Male Character,” Hagey Lecture, U. of Waterloo (9 Feb 1982).
- 18-Jan-21 - "The Christian Way of Life in Human Relations," speech, General Assembly fo the National Council of Churches, St Louis (4 Dec 1957) | WIST on Letter from Birmingham Jail (16 Apr 1963).
- 8-Jan-21 - ***Dave Does the Blog on Speech to the electors of Bristol (3 Nov 1774).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Republic, Book 1, 347c.
The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that “his heart’s in the right place” and “he wouldn’t hurt a fly,” though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty.