Quotes on Ifs

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

Unconsciously we seek the principles and opinions which are suited to our temperament, so that at last it seems as if these principles and opinions had formed our character and given it support and stability.

I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.

And if thy heart be straight with God then every creature shall be to thee a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine for there is no creature so little or so despised but that sheweth and representeth the goodness of God.

I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.

Blasphemy? No, it is not blashphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, He is beneath it.

They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?

Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.

Creation is the great redemption from suffering and all life's growing light. But the creator must be suffering if needed and accept much change.

If I ever lose my mind I hope some honest person will find it and take it to Lost and Found.

If the reason for climbing Mt. Everest is that it's hard to do, why does everyone go up the easy side?

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

I want every American to be free to stand up for his rights, even if sometimes he has to sit down for them.