C

CAPITALISM
In arguing that capitalism as such is not the cause of war, I must not be taken as arguing that capitalists do not often believe in war. Believe that they and their country from it.
Norman Angell
The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter
What we mean when we say we are for or against capitalism is that we like or dislike a certain civilization or scheme of life.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Capital as such as is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.
MOHANDAS GANDHI
Censorship
Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
Ludwig Borns
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.
A. Whitney Griswold
….none of us would trade freedom of expression and of ideas for the narrowness of the public censor.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
Potter Stewart
Chance
There is no such thing as chance or accident, the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.
Adam Clarke
Great things spring from casualties.
Disraeli
Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
Theophile Gautier
In the fields of observation chance favours only those minds which are prepared.
Louis Pasteur
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
Voltaire
We are excited to have this chance for our children to learn about India’s wonderful culture and history.
ANGELINA JOLIE (in PUNE)
Change
Change the name, and the story is told about you.
HORACE
They change their climate, not their soul, who run beyond the sea.
HORACE
The more it changes the more it is the same thing.
KARR, JEAN BAPTISTE ALPHONSE
When change itself can give no more,
It is easy to be true.
SEDLEY, SIR CHARLES
At the first sight
They have changed eyes.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
How changed from him whom we knew.
VIRGIL
All changing things experienced in this changing world are known by light of consciousness, which carries on unchanged in all apparent change.
ISHA UPNISHAD
By going from appearances to consciousness on which they stand
reality may be attained and truth of self be realised: for both are one in consciousness.
ISHA UPNISHAD
When it in not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.
lucius cary, viscount falkland
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths in and out of favour.
Robert Frost
It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.
Groucho Mars
Change alone is eternal perpetual, immortal.
Arthur Schopenhauer
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
Harold Wilson
Character
Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.
MEREDITH, GEORGE
Education has for its object the formation of character.
SPENCER, HERBERT
A person, who no matter how desperate the situation, gives
Others hope, is a true leader.
Daisaku Ikeda
Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.
Mahatma gandhi
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale; diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.
Disraeli
A man of character will make himself worthy of any position he is given.
Mahatma Gandhi
Character is what you are in the dark.
Dwight l. Moody
An aristocrat in morals as in mind.
Owen Wister
Children
Do no sinful action,
Speak no angry word;
Ye belong to Jesus,
Children of the Lord.
ALEXANDER, CECIL FRANCES
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill.
BLAKE, WILLIAM
Men are but children of larger growth.
DRYDEN, JOHN
If I were dead, you’d sometimes say, ‘Poor Child!’
PATMORE, COVENTRY KERSEY DIGHTON
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends.
J K Rowling
Children must be protected not because they are innocent but because they are powerless.
Mason Cooley
You know children are growing up when they start asking
Questions that have answers.
John J Plomp
There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: One is roots, the other is wings.
Hodding Carter
It is wise child that knows his own father.
Homer
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Joseph Joubert
A wise son maketh a glad father.
Proverb
I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my little child.
Tabindranath Tagore
A child tells in the street its father and mother say at home.
The talmud
Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.
Anonymous
Cities
When several villages are united in a single complete
Community, large enough to be nearly or quite selfsufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.
Aristotle
We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
Theodore Roosevelt
Cities are the abyss of the human species.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
CivilIzation
At my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand.
BROWNE, SIR THOMAS
There are not enough bon mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion.
HUXLEY, ALDOUS LEONARD
I expect that Woman will be last thing civilised by Man.
MEREDITH, GEORGE
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.
MILTON, JOHN
Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the muliplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants.
Mahatma Gandhi
The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.
Pandit Nehru
Clarity
I fear explanations explanatory of things expalained.
Abraham Lincoln
That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
Moliere
I didn’t say that I didn’t say it. I said that I didn’t say that I said it. I want to make that very clear.
George Romney
Committees
A commitee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.
Unknown
Common sense
Home-sickness for the gutter.
AUGIER, GUILLAUME VICTOR EMILE
Give me chastity and continence, but not now.
AUGUSTINE
Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.
CAROLL, LEWIS
The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.
CAROLL, LEWIS
You see, but you do not observe.
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN
If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
Henry Ward Beecher
Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it.
Edward Bulwer Lyttoh
If common sense has not the brilliancy of the sun, it has the fixity of the stars.
Feman Caballero
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.
Benjamin Franklin
Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.
Calvin Ellis Stowe
Common sense is not so common.
Voltaire
Compensation
For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.
Ralph Emerson
Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
Garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
Unknown
It is a comfort that the medal has two sides. There is much vice and misery in the world, I know; but more virtue and happiness, I believe.
Thomas Jefferson
There is no evil without its compensation. Avarice promises money; luxury, pleasure; ambition, a purple robe.
Seneca
Whoever tries for great objects must suffer something.
Plutarch
A corporeal phenomenon, a feeling, a perception, a mental formation, a consciousness—which is permanent and persistent, eternal and not subject to change—such a thing the wise do not recognise; and I also say that there is no such thing.
SHKYA MUNI
The triple world originates from the discrimination of unrealities and where discrimination takes place there is duality and notion of permanency and impermanency, but the Tathagatas do not rise from the discrimination of unrealities.
Lankavatara Sutra
Comparison
It’s wiser being good than bad;
It’s safer being meek than fierce:
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
BROWNING, ROBERT
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
COLERIDGE, HARTLEY
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
Three acres and a cow.
COLLINGS, JESSE
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
DICKENS, CHARLES
There were captains by the hundred, there were baronets by dozens.
GILBERT, SIR WILLIAM, SCHWENCK
The man recovered of the bite.
The dog it was that died.
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER
Have you heard of the wonderful one horse shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day?
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL
Over the wine—dark sea.
HOMER
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied,
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died!
HOOD, THOMAS
It is not growing like a tree in bulk, doth make men better be.
JONSON, BEN
Ever let the fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.
KEATS, JOHN
Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side.
To the gallows-foot-and after!
KIPLING, RUDYARD
Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
KIPLING, RUDYARD
Thou art like silence unperplexed,
A secret and a mystery
Between one football and the next.
MEYNELL, ALICE CHRISTIANA GERTRUDE
Dark with excessive bright.
MILTON, JOHN
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated, far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately.
RUSKIN, JOHN
All travelling becomes dull in exact. proportion to its rapidity.
RUSKIN, JOHN
Among the defects of the Bill, which were numerous, one provision was conspicuous by its presence and another by its absence.
RUSSELL, JOHN
The elegant simplicity of the three percents.
SCOTT, WILLIAM
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch
Which hurts, and is desired.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Comparisons are odorous.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
You are one of those that will not serve God, if the devil bid you.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
One fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.
SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP
There are two things to aim at in life; first, to get what you want: and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
SMITH, LOGAN PEARSALL
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
ALFRED TENNYSON
For men at most differ as Heaven and Earth,
But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
TOLSTOY, LEO
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
TWAIN, MARK
Compromise
Oh! God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap.
HOOD, THOMAS
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill
If you are not very clever, you should be conciliatory.
Disraeli
….truth is the glue that holds government together
Compromise is the oil that makes governments go.
Gerald R. Ford
All legislation of consequence is a series of compromises, and there are many trades and deals…in order to get important measures through.
James E. Watson
Conference
I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get score at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conference to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.
Will Rogers
Conformity
Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absouletly nothing— half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
GRAHAME, KENNETH
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
KIPLING, RUDYARD
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM
If you are at Rome live in the Roman style; if you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.
Ambrose of Milan
Fair fame is won as a rule by all who cheerfully take things as they find them and interfere with no established custom.
Philo
When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
Conscience
A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quite conscience.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?
THURLOW, EDWARD THURLOW
There is another man within me that’s angry with me.
Thomas Browne
Conscience, good my lord,
Is but the pulse of reason.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The still small voice.
William Cowper
A good digestion depends upon a good conscience.
Disraeli
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
Benjamin Franklin
The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has nay conscience but the man who thinks.
Goethe
That fierce thing
They call a conscience.
Thomas Hood
The sting of conscience, like the gnawing of a dog at a bone, is mere foolishness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinion of others.
Henry Taylor
Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing.
Oscar Wilde
There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
Thus, through My Prakriti, I bring forth all creation, and all these worlds revolve in the cycle of time. But I am not bound by this vast display of creation; I exist alone, watching the drama of this play.
Bhagavad Gita
The first born was the Creative Will, the primordial seed of the mind. All else followed.
Rig Veda
Various articles of clothing are made from the same cotton cloth; likewise of the universe are creatively fashioned of the one
Consciousness, which remains forever pure.
Jnaneshwar
Conservatives
The absurd man is one who never changes.
Auguste Barthelemy
A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
DISRAELI
A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
ELBERT HUBBARD
What is conservation? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
ALEXANDER POPE
The man for whom the law exists—man of form, the conservative, is a tame man.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Constancy
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
EMERSON, RALPH WADLO
The villain still pursued her.
NOBLES, MILTON
Without constancy there is neither love, friendship, nor virtue in the world.
Joseph Addison
A good man it is not mine to see. Could I see a man possessed of constancy, that would satisfy me.
Confucius
There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.
Jonathan Swift
Contempt
Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.
Apuleius
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
Edmund Burke
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
Samuel Johnson
Here is another man with whom I cannot get angry, because I despise him.
Benito Mussolini
Man is much more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self- contempt.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Contempt penetrates even the shell of the tortoise.
Persian Proverb
None but the contemptible are apprehensive of contempt.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Contentment
Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in every thing.
Aesop
A perverse and fretful disposition makes any state of life unhappy.
Cicero
I am always content with what happens; for I know that what God chooses is better than what I choose.
Epictetus
Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Ben Franklin
I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.
Hebrews.
One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill
When we cannot find contentment in ourselves it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or nation.
Oscar Wilde
Poor in abundance, famished at a feast.
Edward Young
Courage
The schoolboy, with his satchel in his hand.
Whistling aloud to bear his courage up.
BLAIR, ROBERT
I dare not fight; but I will wink and hold out mine iron.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM

We were not born to sue, but to command.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.
Vittorio Alfieri
But where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.
Thomas Browne
Courage is that virtue which champions the cause of right.
Cicero
Every man of courage is a man of his word.
Pierre Corneille
Fortune befriends the bold.
John Dryden
Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage may be taught as a child is taught to speak.
Euripides
A decent boldness ever meets with friends.
Homer
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals; we storm Heaven itself in our folly.
Horace
Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.
Matthew
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
La Pasionaris
Part of courage is simple consistency.
Peggy Noonan, US author
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.
Keshavan Nair
Courtesy
An earl by right, by courtesy a man.
AUSTIN, ALFRED
Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers it shows he is a citizen of the world.
Francis Bacon
Politeness. The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Ambrose Bierce
Politeness is the ritual of society, as prayers are of the church.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We should be as courteous to a man as we are to picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of the best light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few.
Benjamin Franklin
To speak kindly does not hurt the tongue.
French Proverb
He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.
Samuel Johnson
Civility is a desire to receive it in turn, and to be accounted well bred.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Politeness costs nothing and gains everything.
Lady Mary Wortley Montague
True politeness consists in being easy one’s self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can.
Alexander Pope
Courtship
Those marriages generally abound most with love and constancy that are preceded by a long courtship.
Joseph Addison
Courtship to marriage is but as the music in the playhouse till the curtain’s drawn.
William Congreve
If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The weather is usually fine when people are courting.
R.L. Stevenson
A man always chases a woman until she catches him.
Anonymous
He that will win his dame must do
As love does when he draws his bow;
With one hand thrust the lady from,
And with the other pull her home.
Samuel Butler
Cowardice
For all men would be cowards if they durst.
ROCHESTER, JOHN WILMOT
Coward! One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Ambrose Bierce
To see what is right and not do it is want of courage.
Confucius
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
Thomas Fuller
Bullies are always to be found where there are cowards.
Mahatma Gandhi
Ever will a coward show no mercy.
Thomas Malory
It is the act of a coward to wish for death.
Ovid
The coward calls himself cautious.
Publilius Syrus
A coward, a most devout coward, religious in it.
Shakespeare
Coward die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Shakespeare
Crime
The atrocious crime of being a young man…I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny.
CHATHAM, WILLIAM PITT
Singularity is almost invariably a clue.
The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
He is the Napoleon of crime.
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Ramsey Clark
The real significance of crime is its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such.
Mahatma Gandhi
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other they are worse than ever when, at the termination of their punishment, they return to society.
Napolean Bonaparte
Criticism
I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
ARNOLD, MATTHEW
A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations.
CHESTEERTON, GILBERT KEITH
You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Don’t critices what you can’t understand.
Bob Dylan
As the arts advance towards their perfection, the science of criticism advances with equal pace.
Edmund Burke
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
Disraeli
The damn what they do not understand.
Quintilian
Really to stop critcism they say one must die.
Voltaire
Critics
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
FRANCE, ANATOLE
Let dull critics feed upon the carcasses of plays; give me the taste and the dressing.
Lord Chesterfield
Critics—murderers!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Those who write ill, and they who never durst write, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
John Dryden
Blame where you must, be candid where you can,
And be each critic the Good-natured Man.
Oliver Goldsmith
Critic: a man who writes about things he doesn’t like.
Anonymous
Culture
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
ARNOLD, MATTHEW
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
May the Goddess of culture…may the Goddess of wisdom in company with men, ordinary and intellectual, may the fire divine, and may the Goddess of divine speech with masters of language come to bless us and enshrine our hearts.
RIG VEDA
Curiosity
An Elephant’s Child—who was full of satiable curtiosity.
KIPLING, RUDYARD
What of the darkness? Is it very fair?
LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD
Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.
MACDONALD, GEORGE
Busy, curious, thirsty fly.
Drink with me, and drink as I.
OLDYS, WILLIAM
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity
edmund burke
Shun the inquisitive person, for he is also a talker.
Horace
Curiosity killed the cat.
Proverb
He that pryeth into every cloud may be struck by a thunderbolt.
John Ray
You know what a woman’s curiosity is. Almost as great as a man’s!
Oscar Wilde
Curiosity. The reason why most of us haven’t committed suicide long ago.
Anonymous