Ought Quotes - Page 21

• I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is established you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Taken, Ideas, People

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• I think the Senate ought to realize that I have to have about me those in whom I have confidence; and unless they find a real blemish on a man, I do not think they ought to make partisan politics out of appointments to the Cabinet.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Ferrell, Calvin Coolidge, Robert H. Ferrell, Howard H. Quint (1979). “TALKATIVE PRESIDENT OFF”, Dissertations-G

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• The terrible newly imported American doctrine that everyone ought to do something.

  Osbert Sitwell

  Work, Doctrine, Terrible

  Osbert Sitwell (1977). “Left Hand, Right Hand!: An Autobiography”

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• Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

  Gore Vidal

  Book, Writing, Done

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• Always remember that there is a law of compensation which operates just as infallibly as gravitation, and that victory goes at last where it ought to, and that this is just as true of individuals as of nations.

  William Feather

  Law, Victory, Wages

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• ... God allows the wheat and the tares to grow up together, andthe tares frequently get the start of the wheat and kill it out. The only difference between the wheat and human beings is that the latter have intellect and ought to combine and pull out the tares, root and branch.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Growing Up, Responsibility, Roots

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• Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Suffering, Cry

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• In the older times it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition. But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of their individual powers.

  Lucy Larcom

  Girl, Mother, Children

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Men, Poetry, Virtue

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2006). “A Defence of Poetry: an Essay: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.48, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Attention, Definitions

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes”, p.214

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• A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Ideas, Opposites

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1913*). “Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge”

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• Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.

  James Madison

  May, Forget

  Thomas Jefferson, James Madison (1995). “The Republic of Letters: 1776-1790”

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• As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

  Blaise Pascal

  Beauty, Healing, Medicine

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.17, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Man is clearly made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. And the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thoughtful, Men, Thinking

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• He that opposes his own judgment against the consent of the times ought to be backed with unanswerable truths; and he that has truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.

  Daniel Defoe

  Men, Coward, Fool

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• In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

  Karl Kraus

  Running, Years, Cleaning

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.

  Ishmael Reed

  Education, Hurt, Cancer

  Ishmael Reed (1988). “Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper”, Scribner

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• The bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.

  John Stuart Mill

  Work, Wages, Branches

  John Stuart Mill (2016). “On Liberty: Mill's Works”, p.100, VM eBooks

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• The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

  John Stuart Mill

  Despotism, Customs, Knows

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• I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called "experts" have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won't take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, "I don't like this advice," the parent won't feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

  Benjamin Spock

  Strong, Jobs, Children

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• Some who are not paid what they are worth ought to be glad.

  Samuel Goldwyn

  Glad, Paid

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• The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Way, Authority, States

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.121, Indiana University Press

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• We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off.

  Frederic Raphael

  Block, Philosophy, Fall

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• My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC.

  Gary Reilly

  Dream, Writing, Half

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• I do not think that there is any doubt about where I stand in respect to boycotts. If there is, I will just state what I think about them. They are illegal and ought to be suppressed. I would never countenance that which recognizes their legality.

  William Howard Taft

  Thinking, Doubt, States

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