George Bancroft Quotes
American - Historian October 3, 1800 - January 17, 1891

Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement.
George Bancroft

Avarice is the vice of declining years.
George Bancroft

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.
George Bancroft

In nine times out of ten, the slanderous tongue belongs to a disappointed person.
George Bancroft

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.
George Bancroft

The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.
George Bancroft

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
George Bancroft

Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible.
George Bancroft

By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy.
George Bancroft

The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
George Bancroft

Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
George Bancroft

Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect.
George Bancroft

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.
George Bancroft

If reason is a universal faculty, the decision of the common mind is the nearest criterion of truth.
George Bancroft


Timothy Thomas Fortune Quotes
American - Writer October 3, 1856 - June 2, 1928

I do not inveigh against higher education, I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of, is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any attempt to put him out.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation of the mind for future work, hence men should be educated with special reference to the work.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

It is not safe in the republican form of government that clannishness should exist either by compulsory or voluntary reason. It is not good for the government and it is not good for the individual.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

We are African in origin and American in birth.
Timothy Thomas Fortune

Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.
Timothy Thomas Fortune


Thomas Wolfe Quotes
American - Novelist October 3, 1900 - September 15, 1938

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
Thomas Wolfe

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Thomas Wolfe

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
Thomas Wolfe

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
Thomas Wolfe

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Thomas Wolfe

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
Thomas Wolfe

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Thomas Wolfe

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Thomas Wolfe

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.
Thomas Wolfe

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Thomas Wolfe

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
Thomas Wolfe

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.
Thomas Wolfe

America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
Thomas Wolfe

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Thomas Wolfe

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
Thomas Wolfe

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
Thomas Wolfe


Louis Aragon Quotes
French - Poet October 3, 1897 - December 24, 1982

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
Louis Aragon

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.
Louis Aragon

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.
Louis Aragon

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?
Louis Aragon

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Louis Aragon

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.
Louis Aragon

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
Louis Aragon

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.
Louis Aragon

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.
Louis Aragon


James Herriot Quotes
British - Writer October 3, 1916 - February 23, 1995

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
James Herriot

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.
James Herriot

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.
James Herriot

I wish people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon us.
James Herriot

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.
James Herriot

I hope to make people realize how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be kind and take care of their needs.
James Herriot

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.
James Herriot

I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted animals by the roadside.
James Herriot

I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.
James Herriot

I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.
James Herriot

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.
James Herriot

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
James Herriot

I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.
James Herriot

I will write another book if I feel like it.
James Herriot

If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
James Herriot

They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.
James Herriot