Poems List

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

a man life is from womb to tomb,so be good and good to people and be be happy untill you live on earth

Ignorance.... the cause and cure for every problem.

When it comes to food you can take the words Natural and Pure and throw them in the trash.

Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way.

Liberty--liberty within the law--and civilization are inseparable, and though both were threatened we find them now secure; and there comes to Americans the profound assurance that our representative government is the highest expression and surest guaranty of both.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed;Give me courage to change things which must be changed;And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

Johannes Meintjes… is one of the more articulate South Africans of his generation. A prolific painter, he is also a fluent author in both English and Afrikaans. With unresting curiosity about South African national and regional history, he seems blessedly free from political or racial bias, and when he writes of nations or persons in conflict is alert to what is good or bad on both sides.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness, when bequeathed by those who. when alive, would not have contributed.

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

Avarice has ruined more souls than extravagance.