D.E. Stevenson Quotes

My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations–great or small–to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

Wine is bottled poetry.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

The most promising evidence bearing on reincarnation seems to come from the spontaneous cases, especially among children.

Eggheads, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Children are certainly too good to be true.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

You can be a career professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and never insist on fairness and justice. That's tragic and that's what we have to change.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.

California lacks a lot of the rules and restrictions the East has. Every house is a different style, different material, different color. There's a lot of craziness out there

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

I hope to have more time to think, to look at the sky, dealing with less crisis management, to learn another language, to travel.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

The world has no room for cowards.

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

Your public servants serve you right; indeed often they serve you better than your apathy and indifference deserve.

Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man - not a color.

Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn't seem impersonal or disconnected. That's what motivated me to get into law.

A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.

Change is inevitable, change for the better is a full-time job.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!