O. Henry Quotes
The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.
The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.
Such is the power of imagination, that even a chimerical pleasure in expectation affects us more than a solid pleasure in possession.
Everyone should want to excel in life. You should never take the desire to excel away from the human race.
Unless you plan to out-rebound and out-shoot everyone you play, then you better learn to handle the ball.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
Most of the time, strategies should not be formulating strategy at all; they should be getting on with implementing strategies they already have.
The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.
The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar.
By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.
Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?
When God intends great mercy for his people, the first thing he doth is to set them a praying.
Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defence, the militia, is put in the hands of Congress?
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.
A lot of different races and nationalities play football, so it is a good way to try and stop racism.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Values are sometimes worth living and dying for, and are certainly worth dating and breaking up over.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, the nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.
Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.
When men understand what each other mean, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless
If you wish to make a man your enemy, tell him simply, 'You are wrong.' This method works every time.
