Ruins Quotes - Page 17

• It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and a usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.

  James Monroe

  Wise, Mean, Exercise

  George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, James Knox Polk, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama (2017). “Inaugural Speeches from the Presidents of the United States - Complete Edition”, p.35, e-artnow sro

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• A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.

  Walter Lippmann

  Order, Weakness, Movement

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.503, Harvard University Press

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• Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Giving, Water, Fruit

  Michel de Montaigne, Antoine JAY (1842). “The Complete Works of Michael de Montaigne; Comprising; the Essays, Translated by Cotton; the Letters; the Journey Into Germany and Italy, Now First Translated; a Life by the Editor; Notes: ... Critical Opinions; ... the Éloges of MM. Jay and Villemain; a”, p.46

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• Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes; it damps their spirits; it suppresses art; it extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it; it makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little, and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity.

  Jonathan Mayhew

  Art, Strong, Ignorance

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• I really haven't made up my mind yet. A lot of people have encouraged me to consider running, and others have cautioned against it, saying it's a good way to ruin your life.

  Sandy Hume

  Running, People, Political

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• But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them. Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.

  George Washington

  Mean, Doors, Giving

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• Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischance; injustice; with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Pride, Political, Enemy

  Thomas Hobbes (2010). “Leviathan - Revised Edition”, p.312, Broadview Press

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• Applause lavished at a whim and without discernment, often proves the ruin of young people training for a stage career.

  Jean-Georges Noverre

  Careers, People, Ballet

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• I am reminded, now, of Leonardo's advice to painters: You should fix your eyes, he says, on certain walls stained with damp. You will see in these the likenesses of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, extensive plains; and you will see there battles and strange figures engaged in violent actions. For in such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of church bells, in whose reverberations you may find every word imaginable.

  Ciaran Carson

  Wall, Eye, Church Bells

  Ciaran Carson (2001). “Shamrock Tea”, Granta Books

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• If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.

  Jung Chang

  Children, Parent, Mao

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• You don't want to ruin a kid's life for having a joint.

  Rick Perry

  Kids, Want, Joints

  "Rick Perry, Jimmy Kimmel Talk Marijuana Decriminalization, 2016" By Ashley Alman, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 12, 2014.

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• This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much... I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-established.

  Neville Chamberlain

  Sacrifice, Europe, Victory

  Neville Chamberlain's Speech in the House of Commons, hansard.millbanksystems.com. September 3, 1939.

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• My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.

  Georg Cantor

  Beautiful, Lying, Proof

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• Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

  Dan Simmons

  Rome, Barbarians, Glory

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.571, Spectra

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• And I cried… for all of the women who stretched their bodies for civilizations, only to find ruins.

  Sonia Sanchez

  Civilization, Body, Cried

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• The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encounttering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?

  Howard Lyman

  Law, Childhood, Parent

  "Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat". Book by Howard Lyman and Glen Merzer, 1998.

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• A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Beautiful, Pieces, Matter

  "Composers on Music". Book by Josiah Fisk, p. 364, 1997.

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• Husband, when you tell your wife to go for counseling alone (because you think going to see a counselor is a sign you have failed) is like having a car you love overheat and deciding it's not manly to take it to the mechanic. You can keep on driving it but eventually you will ruin the engine.

  Adam Hamilton

  Love, Marriage, Husband

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• It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

  Oscar Wilde

  Mother, America, Insulting

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “Epigrams and Aphorisms”, p.55, BoD – Books on Demand

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• A pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the ocean

  Thomas Jefferson

  Ocean, Pirate, Insulting

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States”, p.147

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• Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world leadership will, in their [liberals'] eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one.

  Mitch Daniels

  Eye, Loss, Events

  Mitch Daniels' keynote speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee at Ronald Reagan Centennial Dinner in Washington, D.C., www.americanrhetoric.com. February 11, 2011.

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• One false idea is that anyone can hurt you. Events can ruin your reputation, take your money, mistreat you, revenge itself upon you, deceive, betray, abandon you, but cannot hurt you.

  Vernon Howard

  Hurt, Revenge, Ideas

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• It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

  Edward Gibbon

  Fall, Writing, Rome

  Memoirs of My Life ch. 6 (1796)

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• The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

  Rose Macaulay

  Dream, Men, Past

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.), Roloff Beny, Constance Babington Smith (1977). “Roloff Beny interprets in photographs Pleasure of ruins”

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• Anarchism does not repudiate the right of ownership, but it has a conception thereof sufficiently different from [others'] to include the possibility of an end of that social organization which will arise, not out of the ruins of government, but out of the transformation of government into voluntary association for defence.

  Benjamin Tucker

  Government, Organization, Doe

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