Premeditation Quotes

• Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Virtue

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook H 13, 1799.

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• Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

  Herman Melville

  Strength, Literature, Way

  Herman Melville, Lynn Horth (1993). “Correspondence”, p.196, Northwestern University Press

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• If we bestow but a very little attention to the economy of the animal creation, we shall find manifest examples of premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and consumate artifice, in order to effect their purpose.

  William Bartram

  Perseverance, Animal, Order

  William Bartram (1958). “The Travels of William Bartram”, p.57, University of Georgia Press

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• My understanding of first-degree murder is that premeditation needs to be proven.

  Henry Rollins

  Understanding, Degrees, Needs

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• In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.

  Andre Malraux

  Powerful, Organization, Effort

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• The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Death, Liberty, Dies

  Michel de Montaigne, George Savile Marquis of Halifax (1743). “Montaigne's Essays in Three Books: With Notes and Quotations. And an Account of the Author's Life. With a Short Character of the Author and Translator”, p.82

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• These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion -- wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic -- however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.

  Carl Sagan

  Powerful, Grief, Acceptance

  Carl Sagan (2011). “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.209, Ballantine Books

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• We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

  Albert Camus

  Children, Philosophy, Perfect

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.3, Vintage

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• It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.

  Seneca the Younger

  Light, People, Might

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• For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

  Robert Motherwell

  Mean, Drawing, Secret

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• [The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

  Beryl Markham

  Men, Lions, Kind

  McDougal, Beryl Markham (1997). “West with the Night”, McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin

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• Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Hands

  William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

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