Jeff Ford > Jeff's Quotes

“To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Now it happened that this Candaules was in love with his own wife; and not only so, but thought her the fairest woman in the whole world. This fancy had strange consequences.”
― Herodotus

“Well, on the day I was born God was sick, gravely.”
― Cesar Vallejo

“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
― Oliver Wendall Holmes

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
― Adolf Hitler

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“[T]he powerful national State needs fewer internal laws because of the greater affection and attachment of its citizens; the internal slave State can hold its subjects to their compulsory service only by force.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“[T]he efficiency of the individual is increased more by a far-reaching granting of freedom than by compulsion from above, and it must further prevent the process of natural selection, which is to promote the most efficient, the most able, and the most industrious, from being cut short.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility. And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home