Quotes on Ifs

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

Experience shows that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish. Together, we are doing our best to re-establish peace and civil order in the Gulf region, and to help those members of civil and ethnic minorities who continue to suffer through no fault of their own. If we succeed, our military success will have achieved its true objective.

Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

If you can keep on trying after three failures in a given undertaking you may consider yourself a 'suspect' as a potential leader in your chosen occupation. If you can keep on trying after a dozen failures the seed of a genius is germinating within your soul.

Religion is sort of like a lift in your shoes. If it makes you feel better, fine. Just don't ask me to wear your shoes.

That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

Thorns may hurt you, men desert you, sunlight turn to fog; but you're never friendless ever, if you have a dog.

No man can tell if he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.

Lately I was near the beehives and some of the bees flew onto my face. I wanted to raise my hand, and brush them off. 'No,' said a peasant to me, 'do not be afraid, and do not touch them. They will not sting you at all, if you touch them they will bite you.' I trusted him; not one bit me. Trust me; do not fear these temptations. Do not touch them; they will not hurt you.

If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.

If you think about the impact of climate change, [it should be how] a doctor would deal with the problem. A scientific hypothesis is tested to absolute destruction, but medicine can't wait. If a doctor sees a child with a fever, he can't wait for [endless] tests. He has to act on what is there. The risk of delay is so enormous that we can't wait until we are absolutely sure the patient is dying.

I tagged a first-timer one night at fight club. That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel’s face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. That’s the rule. If it’s your first night in fight club, you have to fight. I knew that so I tagged him because the insomnia was on again, and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.