Benjamin Quotes

Is the painter a plagiarist because he sets his palette to nature?

It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it.

If fathers aren't growing up, I would challenge them to want to be a father that is present in the home, so that their kids have that identity.

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

What I am to be, I am now becoming.

To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.

If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic.

The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

America has become politically and culturally agnostic, and the Christian faith in the minds of many has come to represent intolerance.

how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals, it looks as if they had not much of either among them.

Remember, that six pounds a year is but a groat a day.

The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.

Scandal dies sooner of itself, than we could kill it.

If you make a mistake, celebrate.

There is moderation even in excess.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine.

The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.

Actually caffeine is too hard on my system. I'm a delicate boy from Plano, Texas.

Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.

When Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar was asked why there was so much animosity in her country towards the United States, she gave a one-word answer: “drones.”

A pioneer is generally a man who has outlived his credit or fortune in the cultivated parts.

I wonder if you are ashamed of calling a Democratically elected government a fascist government.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ' invasion, but a minimum of pain.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

An honest Man will receive neither Money nor Praise that is not his due.

First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.

Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended

[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.

If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

What's cooler than bein' cool?

Don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.

When circumstances don't fit our ideas they become our difficulties

Human happiness comes not from infrequent pieces of good fortune, but from the small improvements to daily life.

The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.

He that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Lying rides upon debt's back.

Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy