*Classic Quotes by William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) American President *
**I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. **
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**I contend that the strongest of all governments is that which is most free. **
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**There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power. **
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**The people are the best guardians of their own rights and it is the duty of their executive to abstain from interfering in or thwarting the sacred exercise of the lawmaking functions of their government. **
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**Sir, I wish to understand the true principles of the Government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more. **
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**But I contend that the strongest of all governments is that which is most free. **
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**The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators. **
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**There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power. **
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***We admit of no government by divine right....The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.
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*Classic Quotes by Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) American Abolitionist *
**A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. **
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**Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. **
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**I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. **
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**I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. **
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**If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. **
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**It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. **
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**One and God make a majority. **
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**Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. **
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**The soul that is within me no man can degrade. **
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**The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion. **
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**Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. **
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***When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
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*Classic Quotes by Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American Statesman *
**A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you. **
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**A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients: Protocol, Geritol and Alcohol. **
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**A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. **
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**A hungry man is not a free man. **
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**A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation. **
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**A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth. **
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**Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction. **
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**After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquillity of a political convention. **
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***All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
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*Classic Quotes by Langston Hughes (1902-1967) American poet *
**Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying. **
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**Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. **
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**Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it. **
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**I swear to the Lord, I still can't see,
Why Democracy means, Everybody but me. **
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**Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. **
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**Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you. **
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***When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
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*Classic Quotes by James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish Novelist *
**A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. **
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**A man's errors are his portals of discovery. **
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**All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. **
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**And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes. **
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**Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. **
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**Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America. **
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**Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. **
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**I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day. **
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**I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need. **
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**Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. **
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***Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
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**Classic Quotes by Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) American baseball player **
**A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. **
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**Above anything else, I hate to lose. **
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**Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he's losing; nobody wants you to quit when you're ahead. **
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**How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts. **
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**I guess you'd call me an independent, since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label. **
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**I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me... All I ask is that you respect me as a human being. **
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**It kills me to lose. If I'm a troublemaker, and I don't think that my temper makes me one, then it's because I can't stand losing. That's the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first. **
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**Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life. **
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***Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock trade.
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"Conventionality is not morality"
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*Classic Quotes by Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) American President *
**A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. **
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**A nation that destroys it's soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. **
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**Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can't even lift them. **
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**Be sincere; be brief; be seated. **
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**Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live. **
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**Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment. **
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**Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. **
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**Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle. **
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**Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. **
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**I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. **
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**I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. **
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**I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm. **
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**I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues. **
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***If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.
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You cannot change the past, but you can ruin the
present by worrying about the future. **
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*Classic Quotes by Edith Wharton (1862-1937) US novelist *
**A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. **
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**A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue. **
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**After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others. **
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**Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. **
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**Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? **
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**Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive. **
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**How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? **
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**I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views. **