Orator Quotes

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

It is difficult to remember all, and ungracious to omit any.

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

It is wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means.

To stumble twice against the same stone, is a proverbsial disgrace.

When money is unreasonably coveted, it is a disease of the mind which is called avarice.

I have in my life concentrated more on self-expression than self-denial.

If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail.

Things don't happen to me. I happen to things!

But as to the affection which anyone may have for us, it is the first demand of duty that we do most for him who loves us most; but we should measure affection, not like youngsters, by the ardour of its passion, but rather by its strength and constancy.

It is better to be making the news than taking it, to be an actor rather than a critic.

The recovery of freedom is so splendid a thing that we must not shun even death when seeking to recover it.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe... All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.

Our future is in our hands. Our lives are what we choose to make them.

If you want to discover new oceans, you must first have the courage to leave shore.

When I'm in office I always keep Members of Parliament talking. If they stopped they might start thinking.

If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

History is the teacher of life

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.

I prefer silent prudence to loquacious folly.

The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.

To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.

[My ideal of a good dinner] is to discuss good food, and, after this good food has been discussed, to discuss a good topic - with myself the chief conversationalist.

Philosophy is the true mother of science.

No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.

Any man can make a mistake; only a fool keeps making the same one.

There is no castle so strong that it cannot be overthrown by money.

Never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned - yet whose enormous fortune...has already brought him acquittal!

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges

There is no duty more obligatory than the repayment of kindness.

These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.

What is thine is mine, and all mine is thine.

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

Virtue is uniform, conformable to reason, and of unvarying consistency; nothing can be added to it that can make it more than virtue; nothing can be taken from it, and the name of virtue be left.

Danger, if met head on, can be nearly halved

I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.[Lat., Mature fieri senem, si diu velis esses senex.]

I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception.

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

Constant practice devoted to one subject often outdoes both intelligence and skill. - Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit

The United States is a land of free speech. Nowhere is speech freer - not even here where we sedulously cultivate it even in its most repulsive form.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.