- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony. Please feel free to browse and borrow.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (5,835)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,689)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,473)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,835)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,539)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,735)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (3,717)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,581)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (3,027)
- “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,990)
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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
- 12-Feb-20 - "What I Believe," The Nation (16 Jul 1938) | WIST on Letter to Bp. Mandell Creighton (3 Apr 1887).
- 12-Feb-20 - "Equality," The Spectator (27 Aug 1943) | WIST on “On Slavery and Democracy” (fragment) (1858?).
- 3-Feb-20 - "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," lecture, Library Association Bournemouth Conference (29 Apr - 2 May 1952) | WIST on 1 Corinthians 13:11 [KJV].
- 29-Jan-20 - Dave on Authors.
- 29-Jan-20 - Mardy Grothe on Authors.
- 20-Jan-20 - "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," sermon, New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago (9 Apr 1967) | WIST on “Rediscovering Lost Values,” sermon, Second Baptist Church, Detroit (28 Feb 1954).
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, #2666 (1732)
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)
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)
