Victory

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

— Winston Churchill

To the victor belong the toils.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

The only victory over love is flight.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

There is no substitute for victory.

— General Douglas MacArthur

Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.

— John Milton

An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.

— Millard Fillmore

I glory in conflict, that I may hereafter exult in victory.

— Frederick Douglass

History is written by the winners.

— Alex Haley

Winning is better than anything. Better than sex. Better than Christmas morning.

— Bill Parcells, after winning Super Bowl XXV

Time & Timing

I am always quarreling with time! It is so short to do something and so long to do nothing.

— Queen Charlotte

The ultimate of being successful is the luxury of giving yourself the time to do what you want to do.

— Leontyne Price

We must use time creatively...and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.

— Albert Einstein

Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time.

— Hippocrates

I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.

— Bernard Berenson

The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.

— Lord Chesterfield

It takes a lot of time to be sentimental.

— Don Herold

Life is short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be gained.

— Stendhal

Time is the measure of business, as money is of wares.

— Francis Bacon

Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, times stays, we go.

— Austin Dobson

Ah! The clock is always slow; it is later than you think.

— Robert W. Service

Time heals what reason cannot.

— Seneca the Younger

Time makes more converts than reason.

— Thomas Paine

Time is the greatest innovator.

— Francis Bacon

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.

— Lord Chesterfield

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

— G. K. Chesterton

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

— Faith Baldwin

What is a ruin but time easing itself in endurance?

— Djuna Barnes

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

— Ecclesiastes 3:1

Time — the devourer of all things.

— Ovid

You may delay, but Time will not.

— Benjamin Franklin

Time: that which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

— Herbert Spencer

The ripeness is all.

— William Shakespeare

Time wounds all heels.

— Jane Ace

Time is money.

— Benjamin Franklin

Talent

There are two kinds of talent, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while.

— Pearl Bailey

Talent wins out.

— Althea Gibson Darben

Keep your talent in the dark and you’ll never be insulted.

— Elsa Maxwell

A man possesses talent; genius possesses the man.

— Isaac Stern

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

— Bertrand Russell

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

— Honoré de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

— Honoré de Balzac

I have always thought that the surest proof of talent is its condescension to genius.

— Vincent Sheehan

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

— Mavis Gallant

Nothing I do can’t be done by a ten-year-old . . . with fifteen years of practice.

— Harry Blackstone, Jr., on being a magician

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

— Aldous Huxley

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

— Cyril Connolly

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

— John F. Kennedy

Neither cast ye your pearls before swine.

— Matthew 7:6

After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled, “She can’t talk! She can’t act! She’s sensational!”

— Ava Gardner

We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up.

— Sugar Ray Leonard

Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.

— Robert Half

Success

The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions os people who formerly snubbed you.

— Mary Wilson Little

. . . the man who succeeds is never conceded the right to fail.

— William Pickens

If every successful man needs a woman behind him, every successful woman needs at least three men.

— Margot Naylor

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.

— Rosalind Russell

The only place where success comes before work is in a dictionary.

— Vidal Sassoon

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

— William Saroyan

If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z, where X is work, Y is play, Z is keep your mouth shut.

— Albert Einstein

The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.

— Don Marquis

Success covers many blunders.

— George Bernard Shaw

Of course there is no formula for success except, perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.

— Arthur Rubinstein

Behind every successful man there’s a lot of unsuccessful years.

— Bob Brown

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.

— Kenneth Boulding

How can they say my life isn’t a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

— Logan Pearsall Smith

We can’t all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

We may stop ourselves when going up, never when going down.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

As is the case in all branches of art, success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and cannot be achieved except by dint of hard work.

— Anna Pavlova

Never claim as a right what you can ask as a favor.

— John Churton Collins

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice.

— Jules Renard

If a man can build a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am perfectly happy to believe that nobody likes us but the public.

— Rudolph Bing

The toughest thing about being a success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success

— Irving Berlin

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

— Woody Allen

[Success] means that you have, as performers will call it, “f*** you” money. . . . All that means is that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do.

— Johnny Carson

There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man that didn’t tell you all about it?

— Kin Hubbard

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

— Christopher Morley

All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

— Mark Twain

. . . I’ve always gone along with the view that, first, the surest guarantee of sexual success is sexual success (you can’t have one without the other and you can’t have the other without the one), and, second, that the trappings of sexual success are only fleetingly distinguishable from sexual success itself.

— Martin Amis

Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.

— Oscar Wilde

The worst part of having success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.

— Bette Midler (attrib.)

Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job.

— Josh Billings

Either lead, follow, or get out of the way.

— Sign on desk of broadcasting executive Ted Turner

I can’t imagine a person becoming a success who doesn’t give this game of life everything he’s got.

— Walter Cronkite

There’s only one way to succeed in anything, and that is to give it everything. I do, and I demand that my players do.

— Vince Lombardi

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Nothing succeeds like success.

— Alexandre Dumas

Status

The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.

— Robert Frost

All men are born equal, but quite a few eventually get over it.

— Lord Mancroft

Soldiers win battles and generals get the credit.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Many of the quests for status symbols—the hot automobile, the best table in a restaurant or a private chat with the boss—are shadowy reprises of infant anxieties. . . . The larger office, the corner space, the extra window are the teddy bears and tricycles of adult office life.

— Willard Gaylin

A status symbol is anything you can’t afford, but did.

— Harold Coffin

Status symbols are medals you buy yourself.

— Bernhard Wicki

Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status.

— Ralph Butler

Self-Esteem

We shall have our manhood.

— Eldridge Cleaver

The greatest possession is self-possession.

— Ethel Watts Mumford

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

— Susan Sontag

Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and hardest to overcome, for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, “It’s no use—I can’t do it.”

— Maxwell Maltz

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

— Van Wyck Brooks

Many purchasers of self-help books are grappling with a creeping, leaden feeling that life is passing them by. . . . Why, these purchasers ask, am I not a glittering presence? Why do I not have an ostentatiously large and tastelessly furnished house full of sullen hangers-on?

— Colin McEnroe

Psychoanalysis shows the human infant as the passive recipient of love, unable to bear hostility. Development is learning to love actively and to bear rejection.

— Karl Stern

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

— Thomas Szasz

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

— Eric Hoffer

Justice is always violent to the offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

— Daniel Defoe

The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.

— Elbert Hubbard

Responsibility

It is our responsibility, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.

— Peter Ustinov

Responsibility, the high price of self-ownership.

— Eli Schleifer

It is easier to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.

— Josiah Stamp

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

— Antonio de Mendoza

Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

— Ambrose Bierce

No matter how lofty you are in your department, the responsibility for what your lowliest assistant is doing is yours.

— Bessie James

When Robert Fosse was replaced as director-choreographer on the short-lived Broadway show The Conquering Hero, he complained, “I conceived this show. I outlined it. I cast it. I choreographed it. I drew the first sketches for the design. I directed it. And the first thing that goes wrong, they blame me!”

When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it there.

— Cecil Selig

Reputation

Who has once the fame to be an early riser may sleep till noon.

— James Howell

Character is made by what you stand for; reputation, by what you fall for.

— Robert Quillen

It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzcshe

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

— Cyril Connolly

Either a good or a bad reputation outruns and gets before people wherever they go.

— Lord Chesterfield

Every man values himself more than all other men, but he always values others’ opinion of him more than his own.

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

— Oscar Wilde

Each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval — a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death.

— Mark Twain

A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold.

— Proverbs 22:1

Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

— Margaret Mitchell

Oh! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.

— William Shakespeare

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for ‘tis better to be alone than in bad quality.

— George Washington

There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

— Oscar Wilde

Reputation: what others are not thinking about you.

— Tom Masson

There are times when there is nothing more humiliating in life than the knowledge of being inferior to one’s reputation.

— Eleonora Duse

No nation respects a beggar.

— Elijah Muhammad

I can ruin my reputation in five minutes; I don’t need help.

— Martha Graham

Quality and Excellence

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all. Because if it’s not excellent, it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?

— Robert Townsend

What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.

— Antoine-Auguste Préault

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty . . . but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

As there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, so also there is but one from the ridiculous to the sublime.

— Samuel Butler

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

— Mark Twain

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

— Max Beerbohm

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no perfectly Epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the netmaker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.

— G. K. Chesterton

Good is not good, where better is expected.

— Thomas Fuller

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

— Emile Zola

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

— John Ruskin

It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

— W. Somerset Maugham

It isn’t evil that’s running the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

— Ned Rorem

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word--excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

— Pearl Buck

All I want is the best of everything, and there’s very little of that left.

— Lucius Beebe

The true test of civilization is not the census, not size of cities, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not much meat on her, but what’s there is choice.

— Spencer Tracy, about Katharine Hepburn

A perfectionist is a man who takes infinite pains and gives them to others.

— Alan Benner

First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.

— Leo Rosten

The road to business success is paved by those who continually strive to produce better products or services. It does not have to be a great technological product like television. Ray Kroc of McDonald’s fame did it with a simple hamburger.

— G. Kingsley Ward

Quality is not an act. It is a habit.

— Aristotle

My parents always told me that people will never know how long it takes you to do something. They will only know how well it is done.

— Nancy Hanks

QSCV (Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value).

— Standard imposed by Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s fast-food chain

Praise

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting the quill back in the goose.

— Fred Allen

Well done is better than well said.

— Benjamin Franklin

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dines alone.

— John F. Kennedy

They say, “Gee, you look great.” That means they thought you looked like hell before.

— Richard M. Nixon

The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on thick and exactly in the right places.

— Samuel Butler

His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand on its feet and say to all the world — this was a man!

— William Shakespeare

This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me — and my mother would have believed it.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

We recognize that flattery is poison, but its perfume intoxicates us.

— Charles Varlet de La Grange

Baloney is the unvarnished lie laid on so thick you hate it. Blarney is flattery laid on so thin you love it.

— Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Flattery is all right — if you don’t inhale.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

Some people pay a compliment as if they expected a receipt.

— Kin Hubbard

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

— Victor Hugo

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

— Ecclesiasticus 44:1

I will praise any man that will praise me.

— William Shakespeare

Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.

— Josh Billings

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

— Mark Twain

It is more difficult to praise rightly than to blame.

— Thomas Fuller

Praise is the only gift which people are really grateful.

— Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

Whenever the occasion arose, he rose to the occasion.

— Jonathan Brown, on Diego Velazquez

A man doesn’t live by bread alone. He needs buttering up once in a while.

— Robert H. Henry

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.

— George Bernard Shaw

The greatest honor that can come to man is the appreciation and high regard of his fellow man.

— H. G. Mendelson

Optimism

Gray skies are just clouds passing over.

— Duke Ellington

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant — the digitalis of failure.

— Elbert Hubbard

Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those that will never happen.

— James Russell Lowell

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

— James Branch Cabell

This is the best day the world has ever seen. Tomorrow will be better.

— R. A. Campbell

An Englishman who was wrecked on a strange shore and wandering along the coast came to a gallows with a victim hanging on it, and fell down to his knees and thanked God that he at last beheld a sign of civilization.

— James Garfield

The man who laughs has not yet heard the news.

— Bertolt Brecht

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.

— Sean O’Faolain

The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

— Mark Twain

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.

— Lily Tomlin

I’ve never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.

— Paul Harvey

One must have the courage of one’s pessimism.

— Ian McEwan

“Sayings

Pessimism is the art of finding bad news in a fortune cookie.

An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

Save your good times till later

Always expect the worst, and when it comes, make the best of it.

To believe a thing impossible is to make it so.

— French proverb

Pessimism is the triumph of worry over matter.

A pessimist is someone who makes difficulties of his opportunities.

he man who says it cannot be done should not interpret the man doing it.

— Chinese proverb

Opportunity

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

— Duke Ellington

...there is only one genuine misfortune: not to be born.

— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.

— Henry J. Kaiser

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

— Helen Keller

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

— Mark Twain

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage.

— Benjamin Disraeli

It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize.

— Robert Mallet

Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time.

— Hippocrates

A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.

— Ecclesiastes 8:15

...where legitimate opportunities are closed, illegitimate opportunities are seized. Whatever opens opportunity and hope will help to prevent crime and foster responsibility.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Bad times have a scientific value...We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leadership

It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you have always played it.

— Richard M. Nixon

When you soar like an eagle, you attract the hunters.

— Milton S. Gould

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

— Will Rogers

‘Tis skill, not strength that governs a ship.

— Thomas Fuller

When a leader is in the Democratic party he’s a boss; when he’s in the Republican party he’s a leader.

— Harry S. Truman

A leader is a dealer in hope.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

The leader must know, must know that he knows, and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those about him that he knows.

— Clarence B. Randall

They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

— Matthew 15:14

Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader. Don’t fall victim to what I call the “ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome.” You must be willing to fire.

— T. Boone Pickens

You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that’s assault, not leadership.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

The art of leadership...consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention.

— Adolf Hitler

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

— William Penn

In time of peril, like the needle to the lodestone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.

— Herman Melville

I must follow them. I am their leader.

— Andrew Bonar Law

I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.

— Harry S. Truman

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

— Henry David Thoreau

A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.

— Arthur W. Radford

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it give the light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

— Matthew 5:14-16

Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women.

— Groucho Marx

Either lead, follow, or get out of the way.

— Sign on desk of broadcasting executive Ted Turner

I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help — and God’s.

— Lyndon B. Johnson, on arriving in Washington, D.C., on the evening of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, 1963

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss...The leader works in the open and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

— Theodore Roosevelt

General Dwight D. Eisenhower used a simple devise to illustrate the art of leadership. Laying an ordinary piece of string on a table, he’d illustrate how you could easily pull it in any direction. “Try and push it, though,” he cautioned, “and it won’t go anywhere. It’s just that way when it comes to leading people.”

Now I don’t want you to consider me as just your commanding officer. I want you to look on me like I was ...well...God.

— Bull, in The Great Santini, screenplay by Lewis John Carlino

Initiative and Incentive

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There’s far less competition.

— Dwight Morrow

No man knows what he can do till he tries.

— Publilius Syrus

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.

— Cynthia Heimel

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

— G. K. Chesterton

Nothing can move a man who is paid by the hour; how sweet the flight of time seems to his calm mind.

— Charles Dudley Warner

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

— Thomas Alva Edison

Have the courage to act instead of react.

— Earlene Larson Jenks

To escape criticism — do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

— Elbert Hubbard

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.

— Molire

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

— Ellen Glasgow

The oldest habit in the world far resisting change is to complain that unless the remedy to the disease should be universally applied it should not be applied at all. But you must start somewhere.

— Winston Churchill

A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace.

— Ovid

The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.

— Seneca the Younger

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

— Plato

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

— George Bernard Shaw

In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market...Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

— Anita Brookner

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

— Edmund Burke

The gods help them that help themselves.

— Aesop

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

— Marian Wright Edelman

Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

— Haile Selassie

The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself. He has been essentially defeated in his job.

— C. Northcote Parkinson

Boldness in business is the first, second, and third thing.

— Thomas Fuller

Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder — and turn quickly to my typewriter.

— Sydney J. Harris, on incentive as a journalist

“Where shall I begin, please your majesty?” she asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the king said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

— Lewis Carroll