quotes of day Friday, July 17, 2026

“When people are unsettled, loyal ministers arise.”

“I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.”

“No one is more himself than the moment when he's laughing at a joke. It's at those moments that people's defenses go down, and that's when you can slip in a good idea.”

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.”

“The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.”

“A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.”

“It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.”

“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”

“Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.”

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”

“Guys care about sports teams. I'm not talking about simply rooting; I'm talking about a relationship that guys develop, a commitment to a sport team that guys take way more seriously than, for example, wedding vows.”

“There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.”