RJ > RJ's Quotes

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
― Milton Friedman

“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again.”
― Montaigne

“Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.”
― Vilfredo Pareto

“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”
― William James

“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
― Mark Twain

“Difficulty attracts the characterful man, for it is by grasping it that he fulfils himself.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Advice to a Young Critic

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“The secret to success is constancy of purpose.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Voltaire

“Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?”
― Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu

“My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.”
― E.M. Forster

“Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.”
― Dale Carnegie

“Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.”
― Cato The Elder

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Ambition is the last refuge of the failure”
― Oscar Wilde

“Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.”
― Jean de La Bruyère