There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams, Notes for an Oration at Braintree (Spring 1772), in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams vol. 2 (1960).
Every Society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.
Gouverneur Morris, Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, August 9, 1787, according to James Madison’s notes. See Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 2 (Online Library of Liberty).
Few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention.
Jack Woodford (1894–1971), Strangers in Love (1934).
My first assertion is one that I think you will grant — that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December 1910 human character changed.
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change ? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.
Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924).
There are two ways of spreading light: to be
Edith Wharton, “Vesalius in Zante (1564),” in North American Review (November 1902), p. 631.
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
I have known many people to ask for advice but very few who wanted it and none who followed it.
John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957).
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Edith Wharton, “A First Word,” A Backward Glance (1934).
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power.
John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957).
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (1958).
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
The character Addie in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930).