Struggle Against Stupidity | The World of English https://www.english-culture.com Global Language and World Culture Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:21:40 +0000 it-IT hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.4 https://www.english-culture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/English-culture-icon.png Struggle Against Stupidity | The World of English https://www.english-culture.com 32 32 100 marvellous great quotes https://www.english-culture.com/100-marvellous-great-quotes/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:25:07 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=165232 100 marvellous great quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about …

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100 marvellous great quotes
100 marvellous great quotes

100 marvellous great quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

Audi doctrinam, si vis vitare ruinam: cum sine doctrina nil proficiat medicina.
Proverbium mediaevale

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem he must solve.
Erich Fromm

When muslims become Osho’s followers I will trust them a little bit more.
Carl William Brown

Sobriety distinguishes, discriminates, and says no. Intoxication expands, unites, and says yes.
William James

We’ll meet again in the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams.
Lewis Caroll

The ethics of knowledge and social justice do not exist; instead, there is the use of force, abuse of power, and institutionalized fraud to safeguard privilege, injustice, and the spread of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
Erich Fromm

Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God
Osho

We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung

Syncretinism is santanic!
Carl William Brown

What the herd hates most is a person who thinks differently.
Arthur Shopenhauer

Coniunctio or Coincidentia Oppositorum: if everything makes sense, then nothing makes sense; that’s why we live in a painful and absurd world.
Carl William Brown

I turn cruel when I am empty, If I cannot be loved, I must be feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

Literature is a defence against the insults of life.
Cesare Pavese

The result of every life is completely erroneous, so why the bothering of calculation, or of having faith.
Carl William Brown

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead

To be happy you must eliminate two things: The fear of a bad future and The memory of a bad past.
Seneca

From the beginning till the end the entire life is a whole process of learning, of how useless it all has been.
Carl William Brown

What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you?
Marcus Aurelius

The human soul is “symphonic”; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard of Bingen

Never play fair in a game where others cheat.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Too many pacifists around, we need a good war here too, like in the good old days, the only hygiene for a world too full of idiots.
Carl William Brown

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
Hildegard von Bingen

Humor is the weapon of the wise for it disarms the arrogant.
Aristophanes

Silence was fundamental for Osho, also because most of the time, speaking is useless, given the ordinary human capacity for understanding.
Carl William Brown

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.
Hildegard von Bingen

Highly intelligent people cannot be evil, because evil requires stupidity and a limited mind.
J.P. Sartre

I wouldn’t like to die alone; it would be better to be in good company, but whose one? Unfortunately, choices have always been my weakness.
Carl William Brown

Se viviamo, è per camminare sulla testa dei Re.
William Shakespeare

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Hildegard von Bingen

Never let the future disturb you. you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason that arm you today, against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Tao Te Ching

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Seneca

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.
Oscar Wilde

Peace is defined not merely by the absence of war, but as a proactive state characterized by the presence of justice, equity, understanding, and human rights.
Martin Luther King Via Baruch Spinoza

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza

In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.”
Aldous Huxley

Stupid matter uses even its most brilliant scientific minds to spread its own harmful imbecility.
Carl William Brown

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
Moliere

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Terence McKenna

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
Confucius

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges

In my mother’s brain, the disease had devastated the garden of memory, but perhaps not yet the palace of dreams. Then, however, death came, and everything collapsed.
Carl William Brown

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
Aldous Huxley

Because there is no man who can be true and just judge of himself, so much will self-love deceive him.
Dante

You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
Karl Popper

Reason is the root through which the resonant word blossoms.
Hildegard of Bingen

Your emotions are servants, not masters. Keep them in line.
Marcus Aurelius

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs.
Arthur Schopenhauer

We are all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
Rudyard Kipling

Galileo said that mathematics is the language in which the book of nature is written, ignoring the fact that nature has no need of books, nor of mathematics, nor of Galileo.
Carl William Brown

Celui qui serait sage n’aurait pas de fou; celui qui a un fou n’est pas sage; s’il n’est pas sage, il est fou; et peut-être, fût-il roi, le fou de son fou.
Denis Diderot

What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.
George Orwell

L’histoire ne vous fournit que des exemples de paix violées, de guerres injustes et cruelles, des champs dévastés de villes réduites en cendres.
Diderot Encyclopédie, article (Paix)

Solitude is the school of genius.
Edward Gibbon

If you are not a master of yourself, then trying to be a master of others is just a substitute to befool yourself, to deceive yourself, and that is what the stupidity consists of.
Osho

There is no pain that the passage of time does not diminish or students. (Nullus pain est quem non longinquitas temporis minuat ac molliat).
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The most stupid thinks that he is very intelligent. Hence you go on giving compliments to each other. All those compliments are lies – and everybody is ready to believe.
Osho

Desiring life, in any case, and to the full extent of this desire, is nothing other than desiring unhappiness; desiring to live is as much as desiring to be unhappy.
Giacomo Leopardi

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
Voltaire

Inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist.
George Carlin

People are so fucking stupid. No one reads anymore, no one goes out and watches and explores the society and culture they grew up in. People have five-second attention spans and the depth of a glass of water.
David Bowie

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.
Osho

Lack of judgment is precisely what is called stupidity, and there is absolutely no remedy for this defect. A dull and limited brain, lacking nothing except a suitable measure of intellect and precision in its concepts, can certainly be trained through study, even to the point of achieving erudition. However, since judgment is usually also lacking in such cases, one not infrequently encounters highly erudite men who, in the use of their knowledge, often reveal this incurable defect.
Immanuel Kant

100 marvellous quotes
100 marvellous quotes

Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. This is the inevitable consequence of any system that seeks to control thought, to suppress dissent, to impose a single, unchallengeable doctrine.
Karl Popper

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
Ludwig von Mises

When a clown seats himself on the throne he does not become a king, the kingdom becomes a circus!
Turkish proverb

If we want to discover what is true, we must be completely free from all religions, all conditioning, all dogmas, all beliefs, and any authority that pushes us to conform; essentially, to be completely alone, and that is very difficult.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Man is so stupid, unbelievably stupid. He goes on throwing the responsibility on somebody else. Unless you stop this you will never become religious.
Osho

Love is the only sensible and satisfying answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

I am not anti-life as other religions are. I am absolutely for life, and life in its essence means love.
Osho

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Achieve some perfection yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The successful revolutionary is a statesman; the unsuccessful one is a criminal.
Erich Fromm

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence.
Osho

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every miserable fool, who has nothing in the world to be proud of, clings to the last resource to be proud of, namely, the nation to which he belongs: in this way he comforts himself and is now full of gratitude and ready to defend tooth and nail all the defects and all the foolishness characteristic of that nation.
Arthur Schopenhauer

To be crazy, some intelligence is needed.
Osho

Essere intelligenti è una maledizione diceva Schopenhauer. Infatti: capisci il gioco, osservi le menzogne, riconosci gli schemi. Ma devi comunque fingerti stupido per sopravvivere.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The first necessity is to realize the evils of the world.
Bertrand Russell

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo

The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown

It is undesirable to believe a proposition to be true when there is no basis for supposing it to be actually true.
Bertrand Russell

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller

God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.
Osho

Man is the only animal for whom his own stupid existence is a problem which he has to try in vain to solve.
Carl William Brown via Eric Fromm

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

If a person has known only sex as life, he is stupid, he is an idiot.
Osho

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

An anonymous man from the 16th century always used to say: “There are many important things in life, the first is eating, I don’t know the others.”
Carl William Brown

If somebody moves from poverty into spirituality, he has great intelligence. And if someone remains in richness and still does not move towards spirituality, he is just stupid and nothing else.
Osho

The secret of happiness lies in facing the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Bertrand Russell

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
Mahatma Gandhi

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson

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Stultorum infinitus est numerus https://www.english-culture.com/stultorum-infinitus-est-numerus/ Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:32:03 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=326 Stultorum infinitus est numerus. Some quotes and aphorisms about stupidity, with links to other posts of quotes and articles about stupidity and power. A great number of people talk too much, but …

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Stultorum infinitus est numerus
Stultorum infinitus est numerus

Stultorum infinitus est numerus. Some quotes and aphorisms about stupidity, with links to other posts of quotes and articles about stupidity and power.

A great number of people talk too much, but pragmatically act too little, and if they try, they can only do stupid and dangerous things. Any reference to Italian politicians are quite imaginary and clearly unreal.
Carl William Brown

If our politicians, legislators, public administrators, legal judges, lawyers, public and private managers, and all the different members of the social, justice, political, economic, scientific, medical and educational organizations were just ordinary intelligent people, I don’t mean geniuses or brilliant thinkers, but only a little bit better than the average human being, how can it be that our world is so stupid, cruel, violent, dirty, unfair, wrongful, painful, polluted, or to put it in simple words, the toilet of the universe, for the vast majority of its population, if not for all its inhabitants at large.
Carl William Brown

People are so fucking stupid. No one reads anymore, no one goes out and watches and explores the society and culture they grew up in. People have five-second attention spans and the depth of a glass of water.
David Bowie

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller

Man is the only animal for whom his own stupid existence is a problem which he has to try in vain to solve.
Carl William Brown via Eric Fromm

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the most bitter.
Confucius

Money management is the only strategy to survive in this crazy, stupid and doped financial world market.
Carl William Brown

Humble, stupid and rich people usually vote for excellent and marvellous stupid politicians, so that they can get more satisfaction.
Carl William Brown

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us.
George Bernard Shaw

Being a scholar of stupidity, how might I avoid to thank a lot of people for their existence.
Carl William Brown

It is all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
Mick Jagger

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

Wise men argue cases, fools decide them.
Anacharsis

Whoever can’t recognise stupidity at a glance is stupid, and a stupid can’t fight stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Stupidity is the only art that permanently truly exists.
Carl William Brown

Our little planet earth is nothing else but an intergalactic school of stupidity. Anyway if you want to choose the best University for a master or a PhD come to Italy.
Carl William Brown

I don’t know if the human race is human, but certainly it’s stupid.
Carl William Brown

The three enemies of human happiness are pain, stupidity and boredom.
Carl William Brown

The human race is not wicked, but it is stupid, and that’s even worse! Dire straits!
Carl William Brown

How can it be that when I wake up in the morning I often think of my first ideal adolescent impossible love and I still remember vividly that gentle little blonde girl of thirty five years ago? Here is once again an evident proof of the existence of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Test your stupidity level
Test your stupidity level

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors determine what is sane.
Carl William Brown

Too much bad writing and too many banal deeds in struggle with too few creative thoughts and too few good actions. By the way, what’s the difference between fair and foul.
Carl William Brown

Stupidity is everywhere, so it is extremely difficult to destroy it. That’s why first of all we must observe and find out more, point it out and denounce it.
Carl William Brown

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.
Albert Camus

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein

I decided to struggle against stupidity to watch ignorance directly into the eyes.
Carl William Brown

If you like this blog you can visit my page on Ko-fi and support me, since I created an account there in order to test and demonstrate human philanthropy and its sense of humor. In any case, don’t worry, take it easy and be happy, since I am a scholar of stupidity, thanks for existing just the same.

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Elections quotes https://www.english-culture.com/elections-quotes/ Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:32:10 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=118919 Elections quotes and aphorisms, a collection of great quotations and words of wisdom by various great authors offered by the World of English blog and Carl William Brown. The total collapse of …

The post Elections quotes first appeared on The World of English.]]>
Best quotes on Elections
Best quotes on Elections

Elections quotes and aphorisms, a collection of great quotations and words of wisdom by various great authors offered by the World of English blog and Carl William Brown.

The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
Elwyn Brooks White

Democracy never selects the best leader it always selects the best liar and that is why every democracy eventually fails.
Plato

Assuming that fools consider the people the true sovereign, and that in a democracy they consider them the true ruler, I remind you that the people, between Jesus and Barabbas, chose the thief, and allowed the Messiah to be slaughtered and crucified.
Carl William Brown

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. 
George Jean Nathan

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. 
Oscar Ameringer

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
Elwyn Brooks White

Don’t blame me. I voted with the majority. 
Author Unknown

Elections are never right or good, they serve only to give morons some power!
Carl William Brown

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. 
Thomas Jefferson

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill

We have plenty of confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our confidence in. 
Will Rogers

Mankind will never see an end of trouble until… lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power… become lovers of wisdom. 
Plato, The Republic

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate? 
Will Rogers

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
Franklin P. Adams

An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. 
George Eliot

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. 
Karl Marx

Best aphorisms on Elections
Best aphorisms on Elections

You don’t have to fool all the people all of the time; you just have to fool enough to get elected.
Gerald Barzan

Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason. 
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

To win in this country these days you have got to campaign down to a thirteen year-old’s level of mental development.
Willie Brown

Defeat has its lessons as well as victory.
Patrick Buchanan

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. 
Richard Armour

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life. 
Elmer Davis

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. 
Charles Krauthammer

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. 
Charles de Gaulle

Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.
Robert C. Byrd

Best quotes and aphorisms on Elections
Best quotes and aphorisms on Elections

Someone suggested me this definition: politicians, overpaid shit! He might be right!
Carl William Brown

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. 
Alan Coren

The most important political office is that of the private citizen. 
Louis Brandeis

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven. 
Will Rogers

George Washington is the only president who didn’t blame the previous administration for his troubles. 
Author Unknown

Don’t vote, it only encourages them.
Billy Connolly

We have a presidential election coming up. And I think the big problem, of course, is that someone will win.
Barry Crimmins

The problem with political jokes is they get elected. 
Henry Cate

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. 
H.L. Mencken

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo

America: where a little thing like a majority won’t get in the way of democracy! 
Author Unknown

Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
Frank Dane

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America? 
Author Unknown

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft.  Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. 
Will Rogers

I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
W. C. Fields

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. 
Clarence Darrow

Our presidential race is beginning to sound more and more like Harry Potter’s duel with the Ministry of Magic. 
Dave Beard

I always voted at my party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W. S. Gilbert

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be. 
Sydney J. Harris

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right? 
Robert Orben

Truth is not determined by majority vote. 
Doug Gwyn

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it. 
Alexander Woollcott

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election. 
Bill Vaughan

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.
Newt Gingrich

Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize. 
Saul Bellow

Everybody except us is running for governor.
Barry Gray

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is… the ultimate indignity to the democratic process. 
Adlai Stevenson

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. 
Robert Byrne

The election is not very far off when a candidate can recognize you across the street.
Kin Hubbard

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster. 
James Harvey Robinson

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate. 
Frank McKinney

Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
June Jordan

Democracy:  The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it. 
Benjamin Lichtenberg

I have just received the following wire from my generous Daddy. It says, “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.”
John F. Kennedy

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress? 
Author Unknown

A politician should have three hats.  One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected. 
Carl Sandburg

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. 
Emma Goldman

During a campaign the air is full of speeches – and vice versa. 
Author Unknown

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. 
James Russell Lowell

A new poll showed that if the election was held today, people would be confused because it is normally held in November.
Kevin Nealon

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen. 
Author Unknown

If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.
Jay Leno

People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people.  Of course, that is not true.  Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote – a very different thing. 
Walter H. Judd

Elections are held to delude the populace into believing that they are participating in government.
Gerald F. Lieberman

Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. 
Author Unknown

If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.
Abraham Lincoln

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. 
Stewart Udall

In politics women type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets and get out the vote. Men get elected.
Clare Boothe Luce

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. 
Gore Vidal

I offer my opponents a bargain:  if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them. 
Adlai Stevenson

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. 
Winston Churchill

Vote early and vote often.
William Porcher Miles

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Richard M. Nixon

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about “character issues.” Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P. J. O’Rourke

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale. 
John Gardner

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age. 
Marshall McLuhan

There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.
Chris Patten

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work. 
Michael Novak

My opponent called me a cream puff. Well, I rushed out and got the baker’s union to endorse me.
Claiborne Pell

Which one of the three candidates would you want your daughter to marry?
H. Ross Perot

The only thing we learn from new elections is we learned nothing from the old.
American Proverb

The Republicans have their splits right after election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.
Will Rogers

There isn’t any finer folks living than a Republican that votes the Democratic ticket.
Will Rogers

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle. 
Alexis de Tocqueville

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide. 
Meg Greenfield

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation. 
James Freeman Clarke

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names, but are as alike in their principals and aims as two peas in the same pod.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
Mort Sahl

Votes should be weighed not counted.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.
Phyllis Schlafly

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
George Bernard Shaw

Everyone was tired with the old style politicians and their flowery rhetoric. I just told them there are tough times ahead, but that they would be less tough with me in charge.
Anibal Cavaco Silva

Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count.
Anastasio Somoza

The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.
St. Gregory The Great

I’m not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Adlai E. Stevenson

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
Adlai E. Stevenson

If you want to get elected, shake hands with 25, 000 people between and November 7.
Harry S. Truman

Let’s try winning and see what it feels like. If we don’t like it, we can go back to our traditions.
Paul Tsongas

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Theodore White

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams

Where annual elections end where slavery begins.
John Quincy Adams

Suffrage is the pivotal right.
Susan B. Anthony

Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch

Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.
John Jay Chapman

Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
Grover Cleveland

The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
O. Henry

The American people have now spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine what they’ve said. 
Bill Clinton

We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
John F. Kennedy

The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear.
John F. Kennedy

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.
Lyndon B. Johnson

There is no city in the United States in which I can get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbia, Ohio.
John F. Kennedy

You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.
John F. Kennedy

I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. “Oh yeah, well I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!”
Ken Kesey

Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Walter Lippmann

We just did a survey that showed… something like 65 percent of the [American] people couldn’t vote for the First Amendment if it was up for a vote today.
Peter Prichard

Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.
William L. Shirer

Our elections are free, it’s in the results where eventually we pay.
Bill Stern

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau

When a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.
Harry S. Truman

In times of stress and strain, people will vote.
Author Unknown

No matter whom you vote for, the Government always gets in.
Author Unknown

When he first ran for office, he appealed to the voters: “I never stole anything in my life. All I ask is a chance.”
Author Unknown

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal

It makes no difference whom you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
Gore Vidal

Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
George F. Will


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Quotes and thoughts by Albert Einstein https://www.english-culture.com/quotes-and-thoughts-by-albert-einstein/ Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:51:26 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=164442 Quotes and thoughts by Albert Einstein, aphorisms, ideas and wise criticisms that demonstrate the greatness and humanity of this scientist and philosopher. Creativity is contagious. Pass it on. Albert Einstein A human …

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Albert Einstein quotes and aphorisms
Albert Einstein quotes and aphorisms

Quotes and thoughts by Albert Einstein, aphorisms, ideas and wise criticisms that demonstrate the greatness and humanity of this scientist and philosopher.

Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein

A human being is part of the whole we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He is convinced that he himself, his thoughts and feelings, are something independent of others, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. That illusion is a prison for us, limiting them to our personal desires and affection for the few closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from that prison, widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

As long as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as long as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

As long as there are men, there will be wars.
Albert Einstein

Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Albert Einstein

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
Albert Einstein

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
Albert Einstein

God is subtle but he is not malicious.
Albert Einstein

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein

Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocrities, who cannot understand the man who rejects inherited prejudices, but uses his intelligence with honesty and courage.
Albert Einstein

Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
Albert Einstein

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
Albert Einstein

Human ethical conduct must be truly based on compassion, education, and social bonds, without recourse to any religious principle. Men would be pitiable if they were held back by the fear of punishment or the hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein

I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.
Albert Einstein

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never hidden this belief of mine, on the contrary I have expressed it clearly. If there is anything in me that can be defined as a religious feeling, it is precisely that boundless admiration for the structure of the world within the limits in which science can reveal it to us.
Albert Einstein

I don’t believe at all in human freedom in the philosophical sense of the word. Everyone acts not only under the impulse of an external imperative, but also according to an internal necessity.
Albert Einstein

I prefer an attitude of humility that corresponds to the weakness of our intellectual capacity to understand the nature of our being.
Albert Einstein

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein

I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.
Albert Einstein

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein famous quote
Albert Einstein famous quote

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein

Life is not worth living unless it is lived for someone else.
Albert Einstein

Mystery is the most beautiful thing we can experience. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein

Never consider study as an obligation, but as an opportunity to delve into the beautiful and wonderful world of knowledge.
Albert Einstein

No, this trick won’t work… How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Einstein

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton)
Albert Einstein

One day machines will be able to solve all problems, but none of them will ever be able to pose a problem.
Albert Einstein

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.
Albert Einstein

Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.
Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein

Science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein

Science is the attempt to reconcile the chaotic diversity of our sensory experience with a logically uniform system of thought.
Albert Einstein

Schopenhauer’s aphorism, “It is true that a man can do what he wants, but he can only want what he wants,” has deeply impressed me since my youth; in the whirlwind of events and trials imposed by life’s harshness, those words have always been a comfort to me and an inexhaustible source of tolerance. Awareness of this helps soften the sense of responsibility that easily mortifies us and prevents us from taking ourselves and others too seriously; it leads us to a view of life that leaves a singular place for humor.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
Albert Einstein

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Albert Einstein

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.
Albert Einstein

The gift of imagination has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein

The important thing is to not stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

The intelligent man solves problems. The wise man avoids them. The stupid man creates them. And if the world is full of problems, there must be a reason.
Albert Einstein

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

The only real valuable thing is intuition.
Albert Einstein

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein

The thing about smart people is they sound like crazy people to stupid people.
Albert Einstein

The situation of us mortals is truly singular. Each of us is on this earth for a brief visit; we don’t know why, but very often we believe we understand. We don’t reflect deeply and limit ourselves to considering one aspect of daily life; we are here for other men: first of all for those on whose smiles and well-being our happiness depends, but also for that multitude of strangers to whose fate a bond of sympathy binds us. This is my constant daily thought: external and internal life depends on the work of contemporaries and that of predecessors; I must strive to give them, in equal measure, what I have received and what I still receive. I feel the need to lead a simple life and am often painfully aware that I ask more of the activity of my fellow men than is necessary. I realize that social class differences are unjustified and that, ultimately, they have their foundation in violence; but I also believe that a modest life is suitable for everyone, for body and spirit.
Albert Einstein

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein

The mystical beliefs of our time, manifested in the growing wave of what is known as philosophy and spiritualism, are to me nothing more than a symptom of weakness and confusion.
Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein quotes and ideas
Albert Einstein quotes and ideas

The most precious things in life are not those that money can buy.
Albert Einstein

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.
Albert Einstein

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
Albert Einstein

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

War is not a parlor game in which everyone plays by the rules. When life and death are at stake, rules and obligations go out the window. Only a total rejection of war can be of any use.
Albert Einstein

What is the meaning of our existence, what is the significance of the existence of all living beings in general? Knowing how to answer such a question means having religious sentiments. You will say: but does it make sense to ask this question? I answer you: anyone who believes that his own life and that of his fellow men is meaningless is not only unhappy, but barely capable of living.
Albert Einstein

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
Albert Einstein

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein

Without “ethical culture”, there is no salvation for humanity.
Albert Einstein

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
Albert Einstein


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Three brave and glorious women https://www.english-culture.com/three-brave-and-glorious-women/ Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:22:33 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=157973 Three brave and glorious women. For the International Women Day 2023 I would like to remember three extraordinary female characters, offering this way my homage to all the women of the world …

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Three brave and glorious women
Yana Rykhlitska

Three brave and glorious women. For the International Women Day 2023 I would like to remember three extraordinary female characters, offering this way my homage to all the women of the world who are struggling for justice and freedom.

Yana Rykhlitska, a 29-year-old paramedic who volunteered for the Ukrainian army in the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Mechanized Brigade, has been killed near the city of Bajmut. Yana died during the evacuation of the wounded because the ambulance she was moving in was shot at by Russian troops, most likely by mercenaries of the Wagner Group, who have been slaying the city for days.

Yana was known among the Ukrainian military fighting on the Bajmut front as “the angel of Ukrainian troops”. An insurance company worker, Yana voluntarily joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces to work as a doctor at the stabilization center in the city of Bajmut following the Russian invasion. Furthermore she had been active in raising funds for Ukrainian fighters since the beginning of the invasion.

Yana’s friend Tetiana Zenart explained, “Hours before his medical evacuation vehicle was attacked, I asked her how she was.” “She replied to me that she was having fun and still one piece.” Spanish journalist Almudena Ariza also wanted to remember Yana, whom he met at the military hospital in the besieged city of Bajmut. “He told us she couldn’t talk to the media, but offered us coffee and smiles,” she wrote on his Twitter account.

Rykhlitska’s work was greatly appreciated by the soldiers, but also by the civilian population. She will always be remembered as a brave warrior, especially in Bajmut, where she also carried out ‘on-site’ evacuation work. They call her “bakhmoth angel.” Her loss dealt a major blow to Ukrainian resistance.

Three brave women
St. Joan of Arc

Jeanne d’Arc, also known as Joan of Arc, was born into a peasant family in northeastern France during the Hundred Years War between France and England. In 1429, at the age of 17, she presented herself to the Dauphin of France, Charles VII, and convinced him to give her command of an army to liberate the city of Orléans from the English siege.

Joan also led troops to overcome a monastery named Bastille des Augustins that controlled a south approach to two English strongholds, Les Tourelles and Saint-Loup. These strongholds were part of a series of forts built by the English around Orleans in an effort to prevent anyone from leaving the city and to prevent trade and communication from entering, which helped secure her victory.

Thanks to her military skills and her ability to inspire soldiers, Her leadership and military tactics were instrumental in repulsing an English attempt to conquer France during the war. Joan was able to win the battle and subsequently led the dauphin to her coronation as king of France.

However, in 1430, Joan was captured by allied forces of the English and Burgundians and she was sold to the English. She was tried for heresy and witchcraft before an ecclesiastical court and was accused of having received her military and political instructions directly from God. This was considered heretical, as it challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, she was accused of wearing men’s clothes and of behaving inappropriate for a woman.

Giovanna defended herself with great courage, but she was sentenced to death by being burned at the stake. She was executed in Rouen, Normandy on May 30, 1431, at the age of 19. It was only in 1456 that the Catholic Church recognized her innocence and proclaimed her a saint.

Queen Boudicca
Queen Boudicca

Boudicca, also spelled Boadicea or Boudica, was the queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe. She is renowned for leading a rebellion against Roman rule in 60 CE. Widely regarded as a British national heroine and a symbol of the struggle for justice and independence, Boudica became queen of the Iceni people when she married King Prasutagus. Her name means “Victorious Woman”, known in Latin chronicles as Boadicea or Boudicea, and in Welsh as Buddug.

The rebellion of the Iceni tribe in 47 CE could be considered as one of the causes of Boudicca’s rebellion against the Romans. The Iceni’s earlier rebellion against the Romans shows that despite their alliance with Rome, there were still tensions between the two sides. When the Romans tried to disarm the Iceni, it may have been seen as a breach of trust and a violation of their agreement. This could have further fueled the Iceni’s resentment towards Rome and increased their willingness to rebel again.

On his death in AD 60/61, Prasutagus made his two daughters as well as the Roman Emperor Nero his heirs. The Romans ignored the will, and the kingdom was absorbed into the province of Britannia. Catus Decianus, procurator of Britain, was sent to secure the Iceni kingdom for Rome, confiscating the royal family’s properties and mistreating Boudicca and her daughters.

In response to this abuse, Boudicca led a revolt against the Romans. She raised an army of over 120,000 uniting various rival tribes to form a formidable force and attacked the Roman cities of Colchester, London and Verulamium (modern St Albans), killing and destroying everything in her way. Her most important victory was that of London, which she burned to the ground.

While her forces did manage to massacre approximately 70,000 Romans and their supporters, in the end Boudicca’s rebellion was defeated by the Roman army led by Governor Suetonius Paulinus at the Battle of Watling Street in AD 61. According to some sources, she Boudicca died soon after, while others say she survived and lived for some time after the revolt.

The Roman army was heavily outnumbered – according to the historian Cassius Dio the rebels numbered 230,000 – but Boudica’s army was crushed, and according to Tacitus, neither the women nor the animals were spared. Tacitus states that Boudica poisoned herself; Dio says she fell sick and died, after which she was given a lavish burial. It has been argued that these accounts are not mutually exclusive.

Anyway, despite her defeat, Boudicca has become a symbol of resistance and freedom for many Britons and her story has been passed down through the generations as an example of courage and determination against oppression.

Boudicca Statue Westminster Bridge London
Boudicca Statue Westminster Bridge London

To find out more about women you can also read:

Blessed Virgin Mary and Rosa Mystica

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Arms and warfare quotes https://www.english-culture.com/arms-and-warfare-quotes/ Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:36:06 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=156112 Arms and warfare quotes, ideas, quotations, thoughts and short reflections on the tragedy of wars, arms, weapons, military warfare, soldiers and the cruelty of our race. O Lord our God, help us …

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Warfare quotes and aphorisms
Warfare quotes and aphorisms

Arms and warfare quotes, ideas, quotations, thoughts and short reflections on the tragedy of wars, arms, weapons, military warfare, soldiers and the cruelty of our race.

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
Mark Twain, “The War Prayer”

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.
Charles Evans Hughes

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Omar Bradley Speech to Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1948

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It’s peace that’s wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
Lois McMaster Bujold “The Vor Game”, 1990

The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell.
Hermann Hagedorn, “The Bomb That Fell on America”

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

You’re an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.
Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb

You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Havelock Ellis

How wonderful it would be if the human race, like some animal species, practiced mass suicide in a finally serious and convincing way, not as it has done up to now playing with wars.
Carl William Brown

War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included.
Robert Hall

Any soldier who fights for money and for a dictator is a waste of society, an object without a brain, only capable of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
Louis Simpson

Military helicopter
Military helicopter

In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant “Agent Orange” are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It’s as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel.
Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79

The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
Albert Einstein

Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument.
James Frederick Green

Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people’s blood.
Lucy Ellman

The unarmed man is not just defenseless – he is also contemptible.
Niccolo Machiavelli

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
Georges Clemenceau

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun’s energy…. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein

War is not nice.
Barbara Bush

If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.
Pope John Paul II

The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
George Patton

All the arms we need are for hugging.
Author Unknown

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
Agatha Christie Autobiography

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
Sir Winston Churchill Second World War (1948)

Military exercise
Military exercise

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
Georges Clemenceau

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stewart Mill

Will… the threat of common extermination continue?… Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?
Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein

Either war is obsolete or men are.
R. Buckminster Fuller New Yorker, Jan. 8, 1966

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.
W. L. George

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.
Walter Goodman

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.
Ulysses S. Grant

The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.
Homer The Iliad

The destructive forces of humanity are directly proportional to the scientific, technological, sociological, economic, political and military capabilities of its imbecility.
Carl William Brown

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
George Orwell

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
Will Rogers

You can’t say that civilization won’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky
Solomon Short

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao Tse-Tung

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
Martin Amis

If this phrase of the ‘balance of power’ is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
John Bright

Carl William Brown
Carl William Brown

Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.
Alexander Cockburn

When a war breaks out, everyone hopes it will end soon, the only ones who want it to continue as long as possible are those who died first.
Carl William Brown

At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo — slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space.
Bernard Cooper

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.
John Foster Dulles

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
Hermann Goering

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
John F. Kennedy

I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.
Neil Kinnock

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry Kissinger

The emotional security and political stability in this country entitle us to be a nuclear power.
Sir Ronald Mason

So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.
Ronald Reagan

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
Vegetius

In past times during the various battles mostly soldiers died, nowadays progress has meant that in times of war mostly civilians die.
Carl William Brown

How happy is the sailor’s life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
Isaac Bickerstaffe

Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
Ambrose Bierce

Valor, glory, firmness, skill, generosity, steadiness in battle and ability to rule — these constitute the duty of a soldier. They flow from his own nature.
Bhagavad Gita

The Royal Navy of England hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.
Sir William Blackstone

If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
Rupert Brooke

Modern missiles
Modern missiles

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.
Edmund Burke

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
Lord Byron

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Joseph Conrad

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Winston Churchill

War is too important a matter to be left to the military.
Georges Clemenceau

The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
Calvin Coolidge

I had rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.
Oliver Cromwell

Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?
Daniel Daly

Stupidity and aggression, selfishness and greed lead to war, but people don’t seem to worry too much, at least until the grenades fall on their feet.
Carl William Brown

I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him, that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there is not any such here.
Sir Francis Drake

Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure.
John Dryden

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rogues, would you live forever?
(Frederick II) Frederick The Great

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
Samuel Johnson

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damn near killed the army.
Sir Richard Hull

Intercontinental missile
Intercontinental missile

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
Samuel Johnson

Now, you mummy’s darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no war, you die with clean boots on.
Gerald Kersh

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling

Rather than a peace made possible by a people of slaves, a war fought by free people is certainly better.
Carl William Brown

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
Karl Kraus

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
Thomas B. Macaulay

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.
Zedong Mao

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He’s the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.
Allan Massie

No profession or occupation is more pleasing than the military; a profession or exercise both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is true valor) and noble in its cause. No utility either more just or universal than the protection of the repose or defense of the greatness of one’s country. The company and daily conversation of so many noble, young and active men cannot but be well pleasing to you.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The army is the true nobility of our country.
Napoleon III

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.
Sean O’Casey

There is something about going to sea. A little bit of discipline, self-discipline and humility are required.
Prince Andrew

An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.
Arabian Proverb

‘Tis the soldier’s life to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.
William Shakespeare

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be never so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
William Shakespeare

History shows that there are no invincible armies.
Joseph Stalin

In a world dominated by stupidity, ignorance is strength and war is peace, as Orwell also said.
Carl William Brown

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.
Mary W. Stewart

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to longevity.
Sun Tzu

War euro fighters
War euro fighters

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
Henry David Thoreau

That’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
Mark Twain

In this country it’s a good thing to kill an admiral now and then to encourage the others.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: “he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.
George Washington

I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they terrify me.
Arthur (Duke of Wellington) Wellesley

We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.
Arthur (Duke of Wellington) Wellesley

O the joy of the strong-brawn’d fighter, towering in the arena in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.
Walt Whitman

Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
Thomas Wolfe

Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.
Mary Wollstonecraft

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
William Butler Yeats

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