Ella Wheeler Wilcox Quotes
American - Writer November 5, 1850 - October 30, 1919

No difficulty can discourage, no obstacle dismay, no trouble dishearten the man who has acquired the art of being alive. Difficulties are but dares of fate, obstacles but hurdles to try his skill, troubles but bitter tonics to give him strength; and he rises higher and looms greater after each encounter with adversity.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A weed is but an unloved flower.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Let there be many windows to your soul, that all the glory of the world may beautify it.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The spark divine dwells in thee: let it grow.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

And the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through tears.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes, and men grow better as the world grows old.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It's the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

'Tis easy enough to be pleasant, When life flows along like a song; But the man worth while is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The man who radiates good cheer, who makes life happier wherever he meets it, is always a man of vision and faith.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The splendid discontent of God With chaos made the world. And from the discontent of man The worlds best progress springs.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Give us that grand word 'woman' once again, and let's have done with 'lady'; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Earth is the anteroom of Heaven, if we choose to see it so.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox


Eugene V. Debs Quotes
American - Politician November 5, 1855 - October 20, 1926

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Eugene V. Debs

The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
Eugene V. Debs

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
Eugene V. Debs

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
Eugene V. Debs

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.
Eugene V. Debs

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.
Eugene V. Debs

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
Eugene V. Debs


Ida Tarbell Quotes
American - Journalist November 5, 1857 - January 6, 1944

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.
Ida Tarbell

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.
Ida Tarbell

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.
Ida Tarbell

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else - men, guns, ammunition.
Ida Tarbell

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.
Ida Tarbell


Will Durant Quotes
American - Historian November 5, 1885 - November 7, 1981


We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Will Durant

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
Will Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
Will Durant

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
Will Durant

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
Will Durant

Education is the transmission of civilization.
Will Durant

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Will Durant

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
Will Durant

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
Will Durant

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
Will Durant

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
Will Durant

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Will Durant

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Will Durant

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Will Durant

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Will Durant

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
Will Durant

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant

The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Will Durant

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
Will Durant

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
Will Durant

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
Will Durant

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Will Durant

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Will Durant

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Will Durant

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
Will Durant

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
Will Durant

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Will Durant

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Will Durant

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Will Durant

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
Will Durant

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Will Durant

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
Will Durant

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
Will Durant

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
Will Durant