P

Past
I reject the monstrous theory that while a man may redeem the past a woman never can.
CAINE, SIR THOMAS HENRY HALL
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays
All, all are gone the old familiar faces.
LAMB, CHARLES
Things past redress are now with me past care.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
O, if Jupiter would restore to me the years that are past!
VIRGIL
What looms over us is no dark fate but our own past.
S RADHAKRISHNAN
One thing alone not even God can do,
To make undone whatever hath been done.
Aristotle
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.
Abraham Lincoln
Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.
John Ruskin
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…
George Santayana
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
John Steinbeck
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Oenn Warren
Patriotism
Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
CAVELL, EDITH LOUISA
My centre is yielding, my right is withdrawing, Situation excellent, I shall attack.
FOCH, FERDINAND
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
HOWARD ZINN
We would rather starve than sell our national honour.
Indira Gandhi
I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
Nathan Hale
Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy
True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same.
Robert E. Lee
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
H. L. Mencken
Patience
Genius is nothing else but a great aptitude for patience.
BUFFON COMTE DE
Patience, and shuffle the cards.
CENTLIVRE, SUSANNAH
Beware the fury of a patient man.
DRYDEN, JOHN
Though patience be a tired mare, yet she will plod.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Who wreak wrath are despised as being worthless; Who patiently forbear are valued as gold. Who wreak wrath have pleasure for a day; Who bear have praise till earth shall pass away.
TIRUVALLUVAR
Peace
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
But when rosy-fingered dawn, child of the morning, appeared.
HOMER
Peace hath her victories. No less renowned than war.
MILTON, JOHN
Calm of mind, all passion spent.
MILTON, JOHN
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
MAHATMA GANDHI
At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists.
Benjamin Disraeli
Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
Will and Ariel Durant
I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Peace with all nations, and the right which that gives us with respect to all nations, are our objects.
Thomas Jefferson
The plain truth is the day is coming when no single nation, however powerful, can undertake by itself to keep the peace outside its own borders.
Robert S. Mcnamara
Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.
Woodrow Wilson
People
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM
She is the creator. She is the Mother. She is the power that is inside you and her sole purpose was to love God. So your sole purpose is to love God.
SWAMI SAI PREMANANDA
There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think it’s one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation 200 million can be made into a productive citizen.
Spiro T. Agnew
My plan cannot fail if the people are with us and we ought not to succeed unless we do have the people with us.
William Jennings Bryan
There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.
Winston Churchill
The lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln
I do not want the voice of the people shut out.
Huey Long
People are not an interruption of our business. People are our business.
Walter E. Washington
In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.
Woodrow Wilson
Perfection
The persuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
BURTON, ROBERT
The great aim of culture is the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and how to make it prevail.
Matthew Arnold
I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.
Alexander Hamilton
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
Herbert Spencer
We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.
William Howard Taft
By his father he is English, by his mother he is American—to my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.
Mark Twain
Perseverance
Preserve me from unseasonable and immoderate sleep.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or pertty never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Winston Churchill
Nothing in the World can take the place of persistence… Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calving Coolidge
If we face our tasks with the resolution to solve them, who shall say that anything is impossible.
Wilfred Grenfell
Philosophy
As good as a play!
CHARLES II
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
KEATS, JOHN
Excuse my dust.
PARKER, DOROTHY
Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
I have put my days and dreams out of mind,
Days that are over, dreams that are done.
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES
When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a croward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.
TEMPLE, SIR WILLIAM
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
Charles Darwin
But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.
G. K. Chesterton
Poetry
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
ARNOLD, MATTHEW
Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry the best words in the best order.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
HOUSMAN, ALFRED EDWARD
He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
MILTON, JOHN
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.
RUSKIN, JOHN
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
SHELLEY, PERCY
Policy
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
BURKE, EDMUND
Hippoclides does not care.
HIPPOCLIDES
An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
WOTTON, SIR HENRY
In a scheme of policy which is devised for a nation, we should not limit our views to its operation during a single year, or even for a short term of years. We should look at its operation for a considerable time, and in war as well as in peace.
Henry Clay
There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.
Lord Salisbury
Politicians
For politicians neither love nor hate.
DRYDEN, JOHN
Coffee, which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half shut eyes.
POPE, ALEXANDER
I’m not a politician and my other habits are good.
WARD, ARTEMUS
Man is by nature a political animal
Aristotle
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita S. Khrushchev
There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.
Richard M. Nixon
He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was politician of monumental littleness.
Theodore Roosevelt
I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
Socrates
I’m proud that I’m a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.
Harry S Truman
I’m not a politician and my other habits are good. I’ve no enemies to reward, nor friends to sponge. But I’m a Union man.
Artemus Ward
I’d rather keep my promises to other politicians than to God. God, at least, has a degree of forgiveness.
Unknown
Politics
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
Push, One of the two things mainly conducive to success, especially in politics. The other is Pull.
Ambrose Bierce
Politics is the art of the possible.
Otto Von Bismarck
A political career brings out the basest qualites in human nature.
Lord Bryce
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.
Theodore Roosevelt
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Politics is a fascinating game, because politics is government. It is the art of government.
Harry S Truman
Narrow political considerations, based on regional or sectional loyalties and ideologies, can distort the national vision.
MANMOHAN SINGH
Positive Thinking
Think of your forefathers ! Think of your posterity!
ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY
Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities.
ARISTOTLE
But here, unless I am mistaken, is our client.
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
GIBBON, EDWARD
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
HOCH, EDWARD WALLIS
A sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
IRVING, WASHINGTON
Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.
JOHNSON, PHILANDER CHASE
No one ever became thoroughly bad all at once.
JUVENAL
Push on—keep moving.
MORTON, THOMAS
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what never was, nor is, nor ever shall be.
POPE, ALEXANDER
Be wisely worldly, be not worldly wise.
QUARLES, FRANCIS
It is not enough to help the feeble up,
But to support him after.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
O, wind, If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE
Poverty
Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
SMITH, SYDNEY
This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty…
Lyndon B. Johnson
Power
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
ACTON
Taught by the Power that pities me, I learn to pity them.
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER
Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.
MILTON, JOHN
…our politics has failed. Since no politician can afford to admit this, we must pretend that we are resorting to power in order to make our politics succeed.
Theodore Draper
In the main it will be found that a power over a man’s support is a power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
James Madison
When I resist, therefore the concentration of power, I am resisting the processes of death, because the concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human initiative, and, therefore of human energy.
Woodrow Wilson
Praise
Let arms give place to the civic gown, and the laurel-wreath to praise.
CICERO
He holds him with his glittering eye.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
FORGY, HOWELL MAURICE
All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
KEN or KENN, THOMAS
Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.
KIPLING, RUDYARD
Remote from man, with God he passed the days,
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.
PARNELL, THOMAS
Praising what is lost
Makes the remembrance dear.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Prayer
This morning came home my fine camlet cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God to make me able to pay for it.
PEPYS, SAMUEL
Down on your knees,
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed;
Give me courage to change things which must be changed;
And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Common people do not pray; they only beg.
George Bernard Shaw
May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
May the rain fall soft upon your fields,
And, until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Unknown
Prejudice
To hate a man becuase he was born in another country, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view on this subject or that is a great folly.
Johann Amos Comenius
Prejudice are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.
Tryon Edwards
Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set no religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Sex prejudice is so ingrained in our society that many who practise it are simply unaware that they are hurting women. It is the last socially acceptable prejudice.
Bernice Sandler
Press
To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for alll the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.
James Madison
Whenever the press quits abusing me I know I’m in the wrong pew.
Harry S. Truman
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.
Oscar Wilde
Prisons
Being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned … A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation.
Winston Churchill
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Privacy
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
Willian O.Duglas
Every man should know that his conversations, his corrrespondence, and his personal life are private.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.
Henry L. Stimson
Progress
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Chinese Proverb
The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes or credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.
Henry L. Ellsworth
I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.
Abraham Lincoln
The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place.
Macaulay
Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.
William McKinley
Two conditions render difficult this historic situation of mankind: It is full of tremendously deadly armament, and it has not progressed morally as much as it has scientifically and technically.
Pope Paul VI
I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producting confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Pertonius Arbiter
The day of large profits is probable past. There may be room for further intensive, but not extensive, development of industry in the present area of civilization.
D. Carroll Wright
Promises
If you make a promise, the thing is still uncertain depends on a future day, and concerns but few people; but if you refuse you alienate people to a certainty and at once, and many people too.
Cicero
We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.
Abraham Lincoln
Property
Property has its duties as well as its rights.
DRUMMOND, THOMAS
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
James Madison
Public Affairs
The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.
CARLYLE, THOMAS
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
HAZLITT, WILLIAM
My rule, in which I have always found satisfaction, is never to turn aside in public affairs through views of private interest; but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me right at the time, leaving the consequences with Providence.
Benjamin Franklin
Public Opinion
Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.
INGE, WILLIAM RALPH
I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man- public opinion.
Clarence Darrow
Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.
Gerald W. Johnson
In this and like communities, pubic sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.
Abraham Lincoln
Public Service
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
Thomas Jefferson
There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of the service of humanity.
Woodrow Wilson
The office should seek the man, not man the office.
Silas Wright
…. every kind of service necessary for the public good, becomes honourable by being necessary.
Captain Nathan Hale
… if you are too timid or too fastidious or too careless to do your part in this work, then you forefeit your right to be considered one of the governing and you become one of the governed instead—one of the driven cattle of the political arena.
theodore roosevelt
Publicity
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial disease. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
Louis D. Brandeis
The government being the people’s business it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Publicity is therefore as essential to honest administration as freedom of speech is to representative government.
William Jennings Bryan