Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.
6
Oaths are but words, and words but wind, / Too feeble implements to bind.
8
Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.
6
Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom, there is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls.
10
We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
7
We will not act prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth. But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.
6
[T]each us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth—
7
[T]he time is not far off when many nations in many parts of the world of many political shades and commitments will possess nuclear or even thermonuclear weapons.
6
The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.
18
No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
4
As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.
6
It is always the latest song that an audience applauds the most.
14
Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
9
A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.
9
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
9
Novelties 'please less than they impress.
12
Fler heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
14
For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms. And it was a pity when he reached the end of that stretch of rich brown earth and once again had to step along the resonant sidewalk.
4
I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass—gay-welling, far- floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
8
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
7
Let a man nobly live or nobly die.
7
Be noble! and the nobleness that lies / In other men, sleeping, but never dead, / Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
6
The Stars are setting and the Caravan / Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!
5
The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.
9
Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.
7
Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. v
7
You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.
9
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
11
“Anyway, I don’t want to live in New York. I want some place more like where we used to live in New Jersey. I don’t like living here. There aren’t any trees.”
4
The night / Shows stars and women in a better light.
9
This great city has fed my imagination—it has allowed me to dream.
4
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
6
[New York] isn’t like the rest of the country—it’s like a nation itself-—more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.
6
The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn’t occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.
6
New York is a wonderful city.... It is going to be the capital of the world.
6
Almost all the people I met in New York were trying to reduce.
7
[New York] is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam
8
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
8
[A]s long as what is is—and Georgia is Georgia—I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
7
Melting pot Harlem—Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
7
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.
10
I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
9
You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have the facts, you cannot make proper judgments about what is going on.
8
You should never form judgments from front page headlines. As with a contract, the fine print on the inside pages should be carefully studied.
6
[I]f you work in either journalism or politics...you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways—but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.
10
A newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity.
8
One of the most valuable philosophical features of journalism is that it realizes that truth is not a solid but a fluid.
7
One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one’s eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one’s mistress.
7