It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Developing nations want to become developed nations.

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

India should walk on her own shadow – we must have our own development model.

Love to everybody who is out there progressing and taking things to the next level.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

I feel good because I believe I have made progress in rebuilding the people’s trust in their government.

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

Now we’re in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change – we’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change – inch by inch, day by day.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

In every parting there is an image of death.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.