Quotes on Ought

There is no substitute for practical experience, and if you want to write about people you ought to put down that comic book and go out and meet some of them rather than studying the way that Stan Lee or Chris Claremont depict people.

A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

To ascertain the Lord's will, we ought to use scriptural means. Prayer, the word of God, and His Spirit should be united together. We should go to the Lord repeatedly in prayer, and ask Him to teach us by His Spirit through His word.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.

The world and that which, by another name, men have thought good to call Heaven (under the compass of which all things are covered), we ought to believe, in all reason, to be a divine power, eternal, immense, without beginning, and never to perish.

I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.

The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.

Our articles of confederation ought to be revised and measures immediately taken to invigorate the Continental Union. Depend upon it: there lies the danger for America. This last stroke is wanting, and unless the states be strongly bound to each other, we have to fear from British and, indeed, from European politics.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

A captain of the Navy ought to be a man of strong and well connected sense, with a tolerable good education, a gentleman, as well as a seaman both in theory and practice.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'" "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste." Brett's glass was empty.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.