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69 Aristotle Quotes

1. “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” – Aristotle

2. “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.” – Aristotle

3. “Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.” – Aristotle

4. “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” – Aristotle

5. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” – Aristotle

6. “There is no great genius without some touch of madness.” – Aristotle

7. “My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.” – Aristotle

8. “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” – Aristotle

9. “The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.” – Aristotle

10. “Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.” – Aristotle

11. “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” – Aristotle

12. “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” – Aristotle

13. “We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.” – Aristotle

14. “A friend to all is a friend to none.” – Aristotle

15. “Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.” – Aristotle

16. “Change in all things is sweet.” – Aristotle

17. “The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.” – Aristotle

18. “What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.” – Aristotle

19. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.” – Aristotle

20. “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” – Aristotle

21. “He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.” – Aristotle

22. “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” – Aristotle

23. “I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.” – Aristotle

24. “Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.” – Aristotle

25. “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” – Aristotle

26. “Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.” – Aristotle

27. “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” – Aristotle

28. “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle

29. “Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” – Aristotle

30. “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.” – Aristotle

31. “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.” – Aristotle

32. “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle

33. “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle

34. “Well begun is half done.” – Aristotle

35. “Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” – Aristotle

36. “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.” – Aristotle

37. “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” – Aristotle

38. “Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.” – Aristotle

39. “No one loves the man whom he fears.” – Aristotle

40. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

41. “First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” – Aristotle

42. “It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.” – Aristotle

43. “Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.” – Aristotle

44. “One thing alone not even God can do, To make undone whatever hath been done.” – Aristotle

45. “The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” – Aristotle

46. “Nature does nothing uselessly.” – Aristotle

47. “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” – Aristotle

48. “The soul never thinks without a picture. Hope is the dream of a waking man.” – Aristotle

49. “We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.” – Aristotle

50. “Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.” – Aristotle

51. “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life: the whole aim and end of human existence.” – Aristotle

52. “Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.” – Aristotle

53. “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle

54. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – Aristotle

55. “The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.” – Aristotle

56. “It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.” – Aristotle

57. “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” – Aristotle

58. “No happy man can become miserable, for he will never do acts that are hateful and mean.” – Aristotle

59. “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” – Aristotle

60. “It is possible to fail in many ways…while to succeed is possible only in one way.” – Aristotle

61. “The proof that you know something is that you are able to teach it.” – Aristotle

62. “Through discipline comes freedom.” – Aristotle

63. “To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.” – Aristotle

64. “We cannot learn without pain.” – Aristotle

65. “Happiness is a state of activity.” – Aristotle

66. “All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.” – Aristotle

67. “Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.” – Aristotle

68. “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” – Aristotle

69. “All men by nature desire to know.” – Aristotle

Also: https://www.startuppacks.com/quotes/aristotle-quotes/

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...est-tony-benn-quotes-as-picked-by-our-readers

Tony Benn:

1) “If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”

Tony Benn was interviewed in Sicko, Michael Moore’s documentary film about the health industry in the US. Explaining the post-war creation of the welfare state, he said the popular mood of the 1945 election was: “If you can have full employment by killing Germans, why can’t we have full employment by building hospitals, building schools?”

2) His “Five questions” for the powerful.

Tony Benn’s final speech to the House of Commons as MP was an appropriately eloquent farewell, in which he talked widely on his view of the role of parliament and the wider question of democracy. As Hansard records, he said:

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions:
“What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
And how can we get rid of you?”

If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

3) “Making mistakes is how you learn.”

Interviewed recently for Radio 4’s Today program, Tony Benn was asked to look back on his career. He replied:

I made every mistake in the book, but making mistakes is how you learn. I would be ashamed if I ever said anything I didn’t believe in, to get on personally.

4) “I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so”

when he announced he would not be standing for re-election at the next general election

5) “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

Given the above, this quote is not especially surprising, but worth repeating. Tony Benn was a lifelong campaigner for constitutional reform, and introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage as early as 1955.

6) “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.”

Another quote from Tony Benn’s interview with Michael Moore in Sicko, in which he highlighted poverty and healthcare inequality as a democratic issue. “The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote... an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern,” he said.

7) “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself”

Tony Benn thought any meaningful change could only come from below, and felt apathy was openly encouraged by those in positions of power. “The Prime Minister said in 1911, 14 years before I was born, that if women get the vote it will undermine parliamentary democracy. How did apartheid end? How did anything happen?”

8) “We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”

Blamed by many for contributing to Labour’s lack of electoral success during the 1980s, Tony Benn was a totem for those who rejected the shift to the right widely seen as necessary if the party was to regain power. This shift was eventually completed under Tony Blair, who pushed through the abandonment of clause IV and redefined Labour as a party comfortable with privatisation and free market economics. The quote above indicates why Benn resisted such a move.

9) “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.”

After his retirement from parliament, Benn became the public face of the Stop the War coalition. In a particularly spiky edition of BBC Question Time, his exchanges with US Republican John Bolton included this broadside:

I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we are sitting now and I was here in London during the Blitz. And every night I went down into the shelter. 500 people killed, my brother was killed, my friends were killed. And when the Charter of the UN was read to me, I was a pilot coming home in a troop ship: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’ That was the pledge my generation gave to the younger generation and you tore it up. And it’s a war crime that’s been committed in Iraq, because there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.

10) “A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.”

Tony Benn... a voice of reason to many after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

 

English Literature: A Community

These insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words. Insults then, had some class!

1. "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play. Bring a friend, if you have one." George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill.
"Cannot possibly attend the first night, I will attend the second...If there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

2. A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
· "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

3. "He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

4. "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow

5. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

6."Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas

7. "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

8. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

9. "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

10."He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

11. "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

12. "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

13. "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

14. "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

15. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

16. "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

17. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

18. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

19. "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... For support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

20. "He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

21. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx.

22."He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill