Words Quotes

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

I believe today that there is a need for all people of good will to come together with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain't goin' study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.

We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

Lying, violence, murder, and torture are considered to be justifiable means to achieve the millennial end. Is this an unfair indictment? Listen to the words of Lenin, the real tactician of Communist theory: 'We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth.

Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

We are masters of the unsaid words but slaves of those we let slip out.

Short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

He has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, timid policies, offer today a path to safety.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

We must have a better word than "prefabricated", why not "ready-made"?

I have always been very much struck by the advantage enjoyed by people who lived at an earlier period of the world than one's own. They had the first opportunity of saying the right thing. Over and over again it has happened to me to think of something which I thought was worth saying, only to find that it had been already exploited, and very often spoiled, before I had an opportunity of saying it.

The greatest tie of all is language.... Words are the only things that last for ever. The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of Time. The Pyramids moulder, the bridges rust, the canals fill up, grass covers the railway track; but words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but with all their pristine vital force.

When American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept". There iswisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought....our American military colleagues, after having proclaimed their "over-all strategic concept" and computed availableresources, always proceed to the next step-namely, the method.