- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (8,075)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,103)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,987)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,169)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,899)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,429)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,957)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,767)
- Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907) (3,643)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,548)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Cicero, Marcus Tullius • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • 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.
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- Phillips, Wendell - "Mobs and Education," Speech, Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston (16 Dec 1860) | WIST on “The Boston Mob,” speech, Antislavery Meeting, Boston (21 Oct 1855)
- Andrew, John A. - Letter (1860) | WIST on Areopagitica: a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644)
- Einstein, Albert - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Memoirs of William Miller, quoted in Life (2 May 1955)
- Einstein, Albert - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Letter, unsent (1927)
- Einstein, Albert - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Remark (Winter 1927)
- Opinion: The hazards of medicine by tweet: the case of anti-cytokine therapy for Covid-19 – Med-stat.info on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
- MEDIKI • Opinion: The hazards of medicine by tweet: the case of anti-cytokine therapy for Covid-19 on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
- The hazard of publishing research findings via Twitter - Healthy First on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
- What Does The Bible Say About Politics? - Glorynewstvonline on Republic, Book 1, 347c
- The hazard of publishing research findings via Twitter - STAT | Health Wellness Journal on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
Quotations about adaptability
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.
Eric Shinseki (b. 1942) American military leader, cabinet secretary
Quoted in Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Marines Turned Soldiers,” National Review Online (10 Dec 2001)
Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.
James Richardson (b. 1950) American poet
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, # 4 (2001)
People are very open-minded about new things — as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.
Charles F. Kettering (1876-1958) American inventor, engineer, researcher, businessman
(Attributed)
It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it — that we demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is impracticable.
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American diplomat, essayist, poet
“Abraham Lincoln” (1864), My Study Windows (1871)
If Afflictions refine some, they consume others.
Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English writer, physician
Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #2666 (1732)
(Source)
Richard was not dead. He was sitting in the dark, on a ledge, on the side of a storm drain, wondering what to do, wondering how much further out of his league he could possibly get. His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching soccer on the television on the weekends, for turning up the thermostat if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) British fabulist
Neverwhere (1996)
It is a good Blade that bends well.
Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English writer, physician
Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #2853 (1732)
(Source)
I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) American general, US President (1953-61)
Speech, National Defense Executive Reserve Conference (14 Nov 1957)
Quoted in R. Nixon, Six Crises, "Krushchev" (1962) as "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Sometimes paraphrased as "Plans are nothing; planning is everything."
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American diplomat, essayist, poet
“Abraham Lincoln” (1864), My Study Windows (1871)
To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana (1863-1952) Spanish-American poet and philosopher [Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruíz de Santayana y Borrás]
The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 4 “Reason in Art,” ch. 9 “Justification of Art” (1905-06)
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