The 200 Best Quotes of All Time

The greatest quotations of all-time                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 [Open in app]( or [online]() [The 200 Best Quotes of All Time]( The greatest quotations of all-time [John Hawkins]( Jul 28   [Share](   I am one of the biggest quote junkies you are ever going to run into. I've compiled dozens and dozens of articles about quotes, had a quote website at one time, and I have run both Facebook and Twitter-related quote accounts. So, knowing that about me, what do you think I started doing the very next day after I put out an article called, "The 100 Best Quotes of All Time?" Right. I immediately started thinking about other quotes that belonged on the list. So, I started compiling them, the numbers started to stack up and here we are with, "The 200 Best Quotes of All Time." Let me add the same disclaimer to this larger list of quotes that I did to the first 100 quotes. Obviously, if you're talking about the best quotations of all time out of the millions and millions of notable quotations uttered across all of human history, the list is going to have to be a bit arbitrary. So, I went for quotes that had the most personal impact on me. The ones that really stuck with me, changed how I thought, or alternately, were just so incredibly cool that I couldn't stop thinking about them. These are those quotes. May they serve you as well they have served me. (PS: Feel free to ask for an explanation in more depth on any of these quotes in the comments section!) 1) "David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.'" -- 1 Samuel 17:45, 46, 47 2) "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." -- 2 Timothy 4:3 3) "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Acton 4) "The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions." -- Alfred Adler 5) "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." -- Aesop 6) "The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights." -- Muhammad Ali 7) "Losers find excuses, winners find solutions." -- Anonymous 8) "If you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve it." -- Anonymous 9) "You don't have to do anything other than die and pay taxes." -- Anonymous 10) "Don’t give up the dreams of a lifetime for the joys of the moment." -- Anonymous 11) "Find something you love to do so much that you’d do it for free and find a way to make it into a career." -- Anonymous 12) "There are levels to the game." -- Anonymous 13) "Doing nothing is also a choice." -- Anonymous 14) "Everybody wants to be a beast until it's time to do what real beasts do." -- Anonymous 15) "If you could get a date with the woman of your dreams and she gave you a chance, would you be the kind of guy she would be interested in? If not, you need to improve yourself until you are that kind of guy." -– Anonymous 16) "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Anonymous 17) "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -- Anonymous, but often attributed to Voltaire 18) "It’s likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream." -- Anonymous 19) "F*** around and find out." -- Anonymous 20) "Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else." -- Henry Ward Beecher 21) "Politics is downstream from culture." -- Andrew Breitbart 22) "The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle 23) "Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good." -- Buddha 24) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." -- Edmund Burke 25) "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." -- George W. Bush in the rubble of the WTC 26) "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything." -- Émile Cammaerts 27) "People like people who help them like themselves." -- Dale Carnegie 28) "Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter." - Francis Chan 29) "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." -- G.K. Chesterton 30) "Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." -- Winston Churchill 31) "Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour!’" -- Winston Churchill 32) Mongol General: "What is best in life?" Conan: "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" -- The movie “Conan” – 1982 33) "In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is." -- Ann Coulter 34) "Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards – why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!" -- Ann Coulter 35) "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." -- Stephen Covey 36) "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have." -- Leonardo Da Vinci 37) "Attraction is not a choice." -- David DeAngelo 38) "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" -- Steven Decatur 39) "Masculinity is tragic. Masculinity is a lifelong struggle; a gauntlet run against nature and other men to demonstrate virility and prove one’s worthiness as a man in the eyes of other men. Masculinity is a challenge to honor that ends only in death - a challenge to win coupled with a guarantee that, eventually, even the best man will lose." -- Jack Donavan 40) "A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me." -- Frederick Douglass 41) "I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs." -- Frederick Douglass 42) "What gets measured, gets managed." -- Peter Drucker 43) "Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace." -- Will and Ariel Durant 44) "No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." -- Will and Ariel Durant 45) "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson 46) "All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson 47) "There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip." -- English Proverb 48) "If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked." -- Epictetus 49) "Above all, it’s the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life." -- Tim Ferriss 50) "What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do." -- Tim Ferriss 51) "He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass." -- Edgar R. Fiedler 52) "To be the man, you have to beat the man. Whoooo!" -- Ric Flair 53) "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." -- Gustave Flaubert 54) "The last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances." -- Viktor E. Frankl 54) "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Ben Franklin 56) "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben Franklin 57) "Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough." - Arthur Freed 58) "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." -- Galatians 6:7 59) "The will to win is meaningless without the will to prepare!" -- Joe Gibbs 60) "Everybody wants a quick fix. You may get results, but they won't be permanent. The permanent results come from you having to suffer." -- David Goggins 61) "Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." -- Jerzy Gregorek 62) "When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality, and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value, and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler than saying something like, ‘Please lower my taxes.'" -- Greg Gutfeld 63) "There is one thing that 99 percent of ‘failures’ and ‘successful’ folks have in common – they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway." -- Darren Hardy 64) "One rat turd spoils a whole gallon of ice cream." -- Bob Hawkins 65) "There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch." -- Robert Heinlein 66) "Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." -- Robert Heinlein 67) "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" -- Patrick Henry 68) "Character is destiny." -- Heraclitus of Ephesus 69) "Evolution is the DNA of a continued existence. Those who don't evolve become the subject of a ‘Whatever Happened To’ story." -- Paul Heyman 70) "If not me, then who? If not now, then when?" -- Hillel the Elder 71) "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer 72) "Rudeness is a weak man's imitation of strength." -- Eric Hoffer 73) "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." -- Eric Hoffer 74) "In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists." -- Eric Hoffer 75) "One does not really love mankind when one expects too much from them." -- Eric Hoffer 76) "We are likely to have a regard for the opinion of others only when there is a chance that the opinion might be now and then in our favor." -- Eric Hoffer 77) "Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed." -- Eric Hoffer 78) "Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care, and the other twenty percent are glad you have them." -- Lou Holtz 79) "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." -- Robert Howard 80) "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." -- Hosea 8:7 81) "To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly." -- William James 82) "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." - William James 83) "Duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather." -- Japanese imperials rescript to sailors and soldiers 84) "7 months straight. No stopping, no maintenance weeks, no cheat meals. Why? Because if someone beat me, I didn’t want to look back at any cheat meals and ask, ‘what if.’ I did what it took every single day, and THAT is why I looked the way I did. You either want it or you don’t. Just so you know, there wasn’t a day that went by in the last 8-10 weeks of that prep where I didn’t want just ONE extra yogurt or 5 less intervals of cardio. But I was not going to be outworked! I was NOT going to be denied! And you know what? It was all worth it." -- Tommy Jeffers 85) "In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." -- Thomas Jefferson 86) "For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son; that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." -- John 3:16 87) "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way." -- The “Father of the American Navy” John Paul Jones during the Revolutionary War 88) "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." -- Basketball player, Michael Jordan 89) "No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly." -- Juvenal 90) "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of conflict and controversy." -- Martin Luther King 91) "Four things greater than all things are, – Women and Horses and Power and War." -- Rudyard Kipling 92) "Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what’s going on." -- Chuck Knoll 93) The trouble is, you think you have time." -- Jack Kornfield 94) "The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski 95) "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." -- Charles Krauthammer 96) "Wait too long and life will pass you by. Don’t make the mistake of thinking everything will give you a second chance." -- Ed Latimore 97) "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis 98) "If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." -- C.S. Lewis 99) "All you then have to do is keep out of his mind the question, “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?” -- C.S. Lewis 100) "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." -- C.S. Lewis 101) "Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives." -- C.S. Lewis 102) "I walk slowly, but I never walk backward." -- Abraham Lincoln 103) "Winning is not a sometime thing: it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." -- Vince Lombardi 104) "It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it." -- General Douglas MacArthur 105) "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." -- Martin Luther 106) "And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state [which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler], they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure." -- Niccolo Machiavelli 107) "And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good." -- Niccolo Machiavelli 108) "From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking." -- Niccolo Machiavelli 109) "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison 110) "There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late." -- Og Mandino 111) "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." -- Abraham Maslow 112) "If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up." -- Abraham Maslow 113) "Do not give what is holy to the dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces." -- Matthew 7:6 114) "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s." -- Matthew 22:21 115) "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane." -- Megan McCardle 116) "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." -- The movie “Men in Black” 117) "Do nothing which is of no use." -- Miyamoto Musashi 118) ) "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor." -- Elon Musk 119) "That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger." -- Friedrich Nietzsche 120) "Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use." -- Earl Nightingale 121) "People living deeply have no fear of death." -- Anais Nin 122) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." -- Anais Nin 123) "The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire." -- Richard Nixon 124) "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -- P.J. O’Rourke 125) "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." -- George Orwell 126) "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -- Tom Paine 127) "The things you own end up owning you." -- Chuck Palahniuk 128) "I do not fear failure. I only fear the ‘slowing up’ of the engine inside of me, which is pounding, saying, ‘Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?’" -- George S. Patton 129) "A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week." -- George S. Patton 130) "Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack." -- George S. Patton 131) "With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses." -- Rand Paul 132) "Function in disaster; finish in style." -- Howard Penney 133) "This too shall pass." -- Persian adage 134) "A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control." -- Jordan Peterson 135) "The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort." -- Plato 136) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- The movie “Princess Bride” - 1987 137) "What good people want always results in good; when the wicked get what they want, everyone is angry." -- Proverbs 11:23 138) "A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." -- Proverbs 15:1 139) "If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them a drink. You will make them burn with shame, and the Lord will reward you." -- Proverbs 25: 21-22 140) "Why don’t lazy people ever get out of the house? What are they afraid of… Lions?" -- Proverbs 26:13 141) "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." -- Psalms 23:4 142) "I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless. But not men." -- Mario Puzo 143) "When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns, and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot." -- Ayn Rand 144) "America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance–and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." -- Ayn Rand 145) "You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get at scale." -- Naval Ravikant 146) "Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen." – The movie "The Rock" 147) "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." -- Ronald Reagan 148) "If you’re explaining, you’re losing." -- Ronald Reagan 149) "When you’re playing against a stacked deck, compete even harder. Show the world how much you’ll fight for the winner’s circle. If you do, someday the cellophane will crackle off a fresh pack, one that belongs to you, and the cards will be stacked in your favor." -- Pat Riley 150) "…Perhaps only 45% of success is showing up, while another 45% of success is asking. Asking is the simplest, most efficient, and potentially most rewarding action a person can take. I’ve become such a believer in the power of asking that I am compelled to share with you my Ten Sacred Rules of Success: Rule No. 1: Ask Rule No. 2: Ask again. Rule No. 3: Ask again. Rule No. 4: Ask again. Rule No. 5: Ask again. Rule No. 6: Ask again. Rule No. 7: Ask again. Rule No. 8: Ask again. Rule No. 9: Ask again. Rule No. 10: Ask again. I never cease to be amazed by how many times I’ve achieved results simply because I took the trouble [and in many cases, had the gall or audacity] to ask — and kept asking until I got the ‘yes’ I was after." -- Robert Ringer 151) "The degree of complications and unhappiness in a person’s life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is." -- Robert Ringer 152) "The secret to bluffing is to not bluff." -- Robert Ringer 153) "Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you." -- Robert Ringer 154) "…Consider the possibility that man is to God as a dog is to man, and a dog is to man as a flea is to a dog, i.e., the man, the dog, and the flea, who are merely tagging along for the ride, have neither the faintest idea as to why their masters do what they do nor the means to ever understand why. The question then becomes: Is God indifferent to us, as the dog is to the flea, or does He allow us to suffer for reasons we do not understand? When someone takes his dog to the veterinarian, the dog has no idea why his master allows pain to be inflicted on him. In the same way, perhaps, God doesn’t always give us what we want, but He knows what we need." -- Robert Ringer 155) "Nothing in life has any real meaning except the meaning you give it." -- Tony Robbins 156) "If you question anything enough, you’ll begin to doubt it." -- Tony Robbins 157) "Your emotions are nothing but biochemical storms in your brain and you are in control of them at any point in time." -- Tony Robbins 158) "If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you'll achieve the same results." -- Tony Robbins 159) "Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards." -- Tony Robbins 160) "Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something." -- Chris Rock. 161) "Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better." -- Jim Rohn 162) "If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." -- Jim Rohn 163) "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." -- Teddy Roosevelt 164) "Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far." -- Teddy Roosevelt 165) "It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat." -- Teddy Roosevelt 166) "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones." -- Donald Rumsfeld 167) "If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart." -- Socrates 168) "Pigs don't know pigs stink." -- Dave Severn 169) "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." -- Gen William T. Sherman 170) "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." -- Henry David Thoreau 171) "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." -- Adam Smith 172) "Tolerant, but not stupid! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it! … ’Tolerate’ means you’re just putting up with it! You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane, or you tolerate a bad cold. It can still piss you off!" -- South Park 173) "The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -- Thomas Sowell 174) "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." -- Thomas Sowell 175) "When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." -- Thomas Sowell 176) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." -- Thomas Sowell 177) "In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election, and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon." -- Thomas Sowell 178) "Yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds and tenpence a man. Are you worth more? Prove it. Tonight, the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow!" -- John Stark at the Battle of Bennington in 1777 179) "Naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor. The contrary opinion ‘violence never solves anything’ is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay… They pay with their lives and their freedom." -- The movie “Starship Troopers” 180) "My life is simple, my food is plain, and my quarters are uncluttered. In all things, I have sought clarity. I face the troubles and problems of life and death willingly. Virtue, integrity, and courage are my priorities. I can be approached, but never pushed; befriended but never coerced; killed but never shamed." -- Yi Sun-sin 181) "To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." -- Sun Tzu 182) "It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken." -- Margaret Thatcher 183) "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it." -- Margaret Thatcher 184) "I hate the term ‘Mixed Signals’ or ‘Mixed Messages.’ More often than not there’s nothing ‘Mixed’ being communicated and rather it’s a failure [willful or not] to read what a woman is communicating to a man. The average guy tends to ‘get’ exactly what a woman has implied with her words, but it takes practice to read her behavior and then more practice in self-control to apply it to his own interpretation. When a woman goes from hot to cold and back again, this IS the message – she’s got buyers remorse, you’re not her first priority, she’s deliberating between you and what she perceives is a better prospect, you were better looking when she was drunk, etc. – the message isn’t the ‘what ifs’, the message IS her own hesitation and how her behavior manifests it. Ten dates before sex? This IS the message. Canceling dates? Flaking? Strong interest to weak interest? This IS the message. Women with a high-interest level won’t confuse you." -- Rollo Tomassi 185) "In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least." -- Rollo Tomassi 186) "All right Clanton, you called down the thunder and now you’ve got it. You see that? It says United States Marshall. Take a good look at him Ike because that’s how you’re gonna end up. The cowboys are finished you understand me? I see a red sash; I kill the man wearing it. So run you cur, run, tell all the other curs that law is coming, you tell them I’m coming, and Hell’s coming with me you hear? Hell’s coming with me." – The movie “Tombstone” - 1993 187) "Always protect against the downside – the upside will take care of itself." -- Donald Trump 188) "There is certainly nothing more important in life than what we do at the present moment. A person's entire life consists of nothing more than one moment piled on top of another, over and over again. Once enlightened to this, the warrior has nothing else to worry about, because he realizes that he has only to live in the present moment with the utmost intensity." -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo 189) "It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog." -- Mark Twain 190) "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government." -- Alexander Fraser Tytler 191) "The truth is never the problem. The problem is always the problem." -- Jeff Vanvonderen 192) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -- A paraphrase of Voltaire 193) "A woman will forgive you for being a man and being sexual… There is no forgiveness for not pulling the trigger." -- Erik Von Markovik 194) "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country." -- George Washington to officers of the Continental Army who seemed to be plotting insurrection after Congress refused to give them aid. According to the book, "The Wars of America," many of the men were "overcome" and began "openly weeping." They then agreed to "leave their problems in Washington’s hands. 195) "None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me." -- The movie “Watchmen” 196) "If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete." -- Jack Welch 197) "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." -- Orson Welles 198) "Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful." -- John Wooden 199) "Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature." – The movie “World War Z” 200) "Actually, the life you’re living right now is the result of the choices you’ve made." -- Dexter Yeager --------------------------------------------------------------- [Upgrade to paid]( [Share]( [Leave a comment]( [101 Things All Young Adults Should Know](   [Like]( [Comment]( [Restack](   © 2023 John Hawkins 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 [Unsubscribe]() [Get the app]( writing]()