"To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach for another is to risk involvement. To expose your feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying. To believe is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. They may avoid suffering an d sorrow, but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live. Chained by their attitudes they are slaves; they have forfeited their freedom. Only a person who risks is free."

Ward, William A. on   

"Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give."

Ward, William A. on planning
17 fans of this quote   

"Every great person has first learned how to obey, whom to obey, and when to obey."

Ward, William A. on obedience
7 fans of this quote   

"Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate."

Ward, William A. on leadership
7 fans of this quote   

"Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame."

Greenfield, Meg on politics
3 fans of this quote   

"The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians."

Disraeli, Benjamin on politics
3 fans of this quote   

"A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation."

Clarke, James Freeman on politics
3 fans of this quote   

"The problem with political jokes is they get elected."

Cate, Henry on politics
5 fans of this quote   

"The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all."

Bradlee, Ben C. on politics   

"Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity."

Brittain, Vera on politics   

"The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases."

Lippmann, Walter on politics   

"Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people."

Lippmann, Walter on politics   

"As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality."

Marx, Karl on politics   

"Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities."

Johnson, Samuel on poverty and the poor   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience."

Will, George F. on politics   

"A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years."

Truman, Harry S on politics   

"In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one."

Plato on politics   

"If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out."

Perot, H. Ross on politics   

"Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics."

Mitchell, George J. on politics   

"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."

Einstein, Albert on mistakes
24 fans of this quote   

"It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error."

Cicero, Marcus T. on mistakes
6 fans of this quote   

"Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness."

Augsburger, David on mistakes
4 fans of this quote   

"“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much”"

Walter Lippmann on uniqueness
3 fans of this quote   

" Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in. "

J. Harris, Sidney on uniqueness
6 fans of this quote   

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it."

Bankhead, Tallulah on uniqueness
8 fans of this quote   

"Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. If we must have them, let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to MH."

Bierce, Ambrose on names   

"Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble."

Frakes, Dennis on names
3 fans of this quote   

"In its purest sense, nicknaming is an elitist ritual practiced by those who cherish hierarchy. For preppies it's a smoke signal that allows Bunny to tell Pooky that they belong to the same tribe, while among the good old boys it serves the cause of masculine dominance by identifying Bear and Wrecker as Alpha males."

King, Florence on names   

"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity."

Carter, Jimmy on nations
5 fans of this quote   

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

Borges, Jorge Luis on night
6 fans of this quote   

"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on night
4 fans of this quote   

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

Berra, Yogi on observation
5 fans of this quote   

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

Maugham, W. Somerset on obstinacy
5 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."

Proverb, Chinese on names
9 fans of this quote   

"In treat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. [Ruth 1:16]"

Bible on loyalty   

"No one worth possessing can be quite possessed."

Teasdale, Sara on love
4 fans of this quote   

"To love yourself is the beginning of a lifelong affair."

Bana, Mervyn on love
4 fans of this quote   

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Proust, Marcel on travel   

"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."

Harvey, Paul on memory
8 fans of this quote   

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Percy, Walker on life
3 fans of this quote