Procrastination

My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.

Source: Mark Twain, David Copperfield, Ch 12, 1850

On Trying

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

Source: Mark Twain, David Copperfield Ch42, 1850

Tears

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

Source: Mark Twain, Great Expectations, 1861

Dignity and Holiness

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Source: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist Ch37, 1838

Possibilities as Probabilities

The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.

Source: Mark Twain, Unsourced

On Communication

I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true.

Source: Charles Dickens, The Wreck of the Golden Mary

Death

Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.

Source: Charles Dickens, Unsourced

Majoritarianism

Why should either two men live at the discretion of three, or three at the discretion of two. Both propositions are absurd from a reasonable point of view. If being a slave and owning a slave are both wrong relations, what different does it make whether there are a million slave owners and one slave, or one slave owner and a million slaves? Do robbery and murder cease to be what they are if done by ninety-nine percent of the population?

Source: Auberon Herbert, Unsourced
Taken From: Mises.org, Nov  16, 2011

Slavery to Freedom

... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Source: Frederick Douglass, see Wikipedia entry for source
Taken From: LewRockwell.com, Blog post by Charles Burris, 2011/09/11

Friends and Chocolate

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.

Source: Charles Dickens, Unsourced
Taken From: Unknown

Freedom

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Source: Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1853
Taken From: Unknown

Egotism

All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or the body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life.  Such individuals are made acutely conscious of self, by the torture in which it dwells.  Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by.

Source: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent, 1843
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Religion, Progress and Time Preference

In the ages of faith, the final end of life is placed beyond life.  The men of those ages, therefore, naturally and almost involuntarily accustom themselves to fix their gaze for many years on some immovable object toward which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them ..... This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results; for whilst they were thinking only of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.

Source:  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, V2 Ch2 Section XVII, 1840
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Newspapers

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier

Source: Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to John Adams, 1812 (unsourced)
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

How to Identify Legal Plunder

See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Source: Frédéric Bastiat, The Law 1849
Taken From: Legal Obedience, Walter Williams, 8/24/2011

Best and Worst

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity?

Source: The Collected Poems of WB Yeats
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Patriotism's Roots

...[T]he patriotism that is extolled to us as an ideal and sublime virtue by the poets, by politicians of every school, by governments, and by every privileged class, is rooted not in man’s humanity, but his animality.

Source:  Open Letter to Swiss Comrades, 1869 Mikhail Bakunin (Unconfirmed Source)
Taken From: Doug Casey, My Favorite Quotes

Natural Patriotism is...

Natural patriotism may be defined as follows: an automatic and wholly uncritical, instinctive attachment for hereditary or traditional ways of life which are collectively accepted, and an equally automatic and instinctive hostility toward any other way of living. It is love for one’s own, and a hatred for everything foreign.

Source:  Open Letter to Swiss Comrades, 1869 Mikhail Bakunin (Unconfirmed Source)
Taken From: Doug Casey, My Favorite Quotes

War

When, after many battles past,
Both, tired with blows, make peace at last,
What is it, after all, the people get?
Why! Taxes, widows, wooden legs and debt.

Source: Samuel B. Pettengill or 1829, Moore's Almanac, under Monthly Observations
Taken From: LRC Blog, Lew Rockwell, July 2nd 2011

On Truth

...the mind is below truth, not above it, and it is bound not to descant upon it, but to venerate it; that truth and falsehood are set before us for the trial of our hearts...

Source: John Henry Newman (Cardinal), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2007
Taken From: LRC Blog, January 14th, 2011