AUDEN, W. H.

• Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.


• The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.


• No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.


• One cannot review a bad book without showing off.


• Small tyrants threatened by big,
  sincerely believe
  they love liberty.


• If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please do not raise your hands because I am also nearsighted.


• A verbal art like poetry is reflective. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.


• The shame of aging is not that Desire should fall : it is that someone else must be told.


• Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.


• Poetry makes nothing happen : it survives / In the valley of its saying.


• My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.


• A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.


• A situation in which the actor really suffers can only be found comic by children who see only the situation and are unaware of the suffering, as when a child laughs at a hunchback, or by human swine.


• It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.


• Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.


• Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.


• All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.


• Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.


• What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish.


• Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.

GEORGE ORWELL

• Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.


• A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front.


• Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.


• All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.


• I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.


• Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships. An age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.


• At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.


• Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.


• Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.


• The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.


• The real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different.


• Liberal - a power worshipper without the power.


• It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.


• The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.


• A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.


• If human equality is to be forever averted-if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently-then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.


• Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.


• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.


• To survive it is often necessary to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself.


• To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and the famous.


• As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.


• If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face-forever...And remember that it is forever.


• Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.


• The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.


• Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.


• We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.


• The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.


• The only people who are never converted to spiritualism are conjurers.


• If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.


• Conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on 'despairing of life' into a ripe old age.

ARISTOTLE

• A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.


• How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.


• It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.


• They who are to be judges must also be performers.


• It is easy to fly into a passion - anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - it is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.


• Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers.


• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.


• Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.


• All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.


• Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.


• No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.


• There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.


• Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.


• It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.


• Happiness depends on ourselves.


• The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.


• Hope is a waking dream.


• That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.


• The law is reason free from passion.


• When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.


• All that we do is done with an eye to something else.


• The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness, and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.


• Man is by nature a political animal.


• Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.


• It is not easy for a person to do any great harm his tenure of office is short, whereas long possession begets tyranny.


• In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interests are at stake.


• All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind.


• What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.


• Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them.


• The state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only.


• 
  

Mahatma Gandhi(Mohandas K Gandhi)

• Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.


• It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.


• Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.


• That action alone is just that does not harm either party to a dispute.


• What difference does it make to the dead...whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy.


• Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.


• Capital as such is not an evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.


• It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.


• I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist and Confucian.


• Civilization is the encouragement of differences. Civilization thus becomes a synonym of democracy. Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, is both uncivilized and undemocratic.


• Truth never damages a cause that is just.


• Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.


• Morality is contraband in war.


• There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.


• In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.


• For us, patriotism is the same as the love of humanity.


• Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.


• Hate the sin and love the sinner.


• The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.


• Remember that there is always a limit to self-indulgence, but none to self-restraint.

Thoreau

• The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.


• We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.


• Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.


• All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.


• Spring-an experience in immortality.


• Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.


• Dreams are touchstones of our characters.


• A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.


• What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.


• A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.


• Any man more right than his neighbour constitutes a majority of one.


• I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.


• Lo! Men have become tools of their tools[said on automation].


• What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?


• It is never too late to give up your prejudices.


• Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.


• Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.


• The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.


• Law never made man a whit more just.


• What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.


• Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent.


• Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member.


• The mass of men are unpoetic, yet that Adam that names things is always a poet.


• Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author's character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proof.


• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also aprison.


• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!


• The mass of men lead life of quiet desperation.


• There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking it at its root.


• I never found a companion that was so companiable as solitude.


• At what expense any valuable work is performed! At the expense of a life! If you do one thing well, what else are you good for in the meanwhile?


• The artist must work with indifferency-too great interest vitiates his work.


• The heroic actions are performed by such as are oppressed by the meanness of their lives. As in thickest darkness the star shine the brightest.


• It is not worth while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.


• It is not enough to be busy...the question is: what are we busy about?


• What the first philosopher taught to the last will have to repeat.