Nicholas Murray Butler Quotes

• The world is divided into three kinds of people: A very small group that makes things happen; a somewhat larger group that watches things happen; and a great multitude that never knows what has happened.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  People, Groups, Watches

  57 Copy quote

• Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Motivational, Positive, Success

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1951). “Commencement Addresses”

  68 Copy quote

• Those people who think only of themselves, are hopelessly uneducated. They are not educated, no matter how instructed they may be.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Thinking, People, May

  24 Copy quote

• The limited liability corporation is the greatest single invention of modern times.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Corporations, Modern, Invention

  25 Copy quote

• I divide the world into three Classes - The few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Class, People, Achievement

  34 Copy quote

• An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Funny, Encouraging, Education

  Commencement address at Columbia University

  26 Copy quote

• The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  War, Nwo, World Government

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1917). “A World in Ferment: Interpretations of the War for a New World”, New York : Scribner

  32 Copy quote

• Optimism is the foundation of courage.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Life, Appreciation, Courage

  26 Copy quote

• Cherish yesterday. dream tomorrow, live like crazy today!!

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Dream, Crazy, Yesterday

  14 Copy quote

• Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Years, World, May

  20 Copy quote

• There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Education, Character, Men

  13 Copy quote

• Many peoples tombstones should read, 'Died at 30. Buried at 60.'

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Tombstone, Should, Buried

  10 Copy quote

• The youth of today and the youth of tomorrow will be accorded an almost unequaled opportunity for great accomplishment and for human service.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Opportunity, Youth Of Today, Accomplishment

  19 Copy quote

• Time was invented by the Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Time, Order, Ideas

  13 Copy quote

• Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed businesses planned for profit are apt to fail.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Succeed, Failing, Profit

  7 Copy quote

• Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Religious, Atheism, Liberty

  19 Copy quote

• This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Knowledge, Progress, Desire

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1911). “Philosophy”

  11 Copy quote

• Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Life, Order, Civilization

  9 Copy quote

• Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Eye, Science, Hands

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1895). “What Knowledge is of Most Worth? ...”

  15 Copy quote

• What society needs is broad men sharpened to a point.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Men, Needs, Broads

  8 Copy quote

• America is the best half-educated country in the world.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Education, Country, America

  9 Copy quote

• To exclude religious teaching altogether from education... is a very dangerous and curious tendency. The result is to give paganism a new importance and influence.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Christian, Religious, Teaching

  12 Copy quote

• The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  America, Understanding, Historical

  "The Age of the Americas: An Address Delivered at the Parrish Memorial Art Museum, Southampton, Long Island, September 6, 1942".

  10 Copy quote

• The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Tombstone, People, 30th Birthday

  13 Copy quote

• The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Eye, Ears, Pages

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1911). “Philosophy”

  7 Copy quote

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