Quotes about home
page 13

George W. Bush photo
Norman Tebbit photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
André Maurois photo
Herbie Brennan photo
Akira Kurosawa photo
George Steiner photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On a Dull Writer, reported in John Hawkesworth, The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin (1754), p. 265. Alternately attributed to Alexander Pope by Bartlett's Quotations, 10th Edition (1919). Compare: "His wit invites you by his looks to come, But when you knock, it never is at home", William Cowper, Conversation, line 303
Disputed

Neil Diamond photo

“Far
We've been traveling far
Without a home
But not without a star.Free,
Only want to be free.
We huddle close;
Hang on to a dream.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

America
Song lyrics, The Jazz Singer (1980)

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro photo

“I sit at home
In our room
By our bed
Gazing at your pillow.”

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (662–710) Japanese poet

XXV, p. 27
Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955)

Frances Kellor photo

“Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: When the country first tried in 1915 to Americanize its foreign-born people, Americanization was thought of quite simply as the task of bringing native and foreign-born Americans together, and it was believed that the rest would take, care of itself. It was thought that if all of us could talk together in a common language unity would be assured, and that if all were citizens under one flag no force could separate them. Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through.

Peter S. Beagle photo
Warren Farrell photo
Theresa May photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo

“The spirit and tone of your home will have great influence on your children. If it is what it ought to be, it will fasten conviction on their minds, however wicked they may become.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 324.

Dogen photo

“But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

As translated in The Zen Poetry of Dōgen : Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace (1997) by Steven Heine, p. 61

Mahendra Chaudhry photo
Roger Ebert photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Girolamo Gigli photo

“Heaven is always ready to shut its eyes to our sins when they are not committed before the eyes of the world, and when the lack of witnesses makes it impossible to bring the charge home to us.”

Girolamo Gigli (1660–1722) Italian dramaturge

Il cielo chiude volentieri gli occhi a nostri difetti, quando non son fatti avanti gli occhi del mondo, e quando per mancanza di testimoni non possa compire perfettamente il processo contra di noi.
Il Don Pilone (1711), Act III., Sc. V. — (Don Pilone.)
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 312.

Robert Rauschenberg photo
Anthony Burgess photo
George Soros photo
Theodore L. Cuyler photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Arundhati Roy photo
Taylor Caldwell photo
George William Curtis photo

“And are there no laws of moral health? Can they be outraged and the penalty not paid? Let a man turn out of the bright and bustling Broadway, out of the mad revel of riches and the restless, unripe luxury of ignorant men whom sudden wealth has disordered like exhilarating gas; let him penetrate through sickening stench the lairs of typhus, the dens of small-pox, the coverts of all loathsome disease and unimaginable crimes; let him see the dull, starved, stolid, lowering faces, the human heaps of utter woe, and, like Jefferson in contemplating slavery a hundred years ago in Virginia, he will murmur with bowed head, 'I tremble for this city when I remember that God is just'. Is his justice any surer in a tenement-house than it is in a State? Filth in the city is pestilence. Injustice in the State is civil war. 'Gentlemen', said George Mason, a friend and neighbor of Jefferson's, in the Convention that framed the Constitution, 'by an inscrutable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities'. 'Oh no. gentlemen, it is no such thing', replied John Rutledge of South Carolina. 'Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question. Interest is the governing principle with nations'. The descendants of John Rutledge live in the State which quivers still with the terrible tread of Sherman and his men. Let them answer! Oh seaports and factories, silent and ruined! Oh barns and granaries, heaps of blackened desolation! Oh wasted homes, bleeding hearts, starving mouths! Oh land consumed in the fire your own hands kindled! Was not John Rutledge wrong, was not George Mason right, that prosperity which is only money in the purse, and not justice or fair play, is the most cruel traitor, and will cheat you of your heart's blood in the end?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Thomas Hood photo

“Home-made dishes that drive one from home.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Her Honeymoon; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

John Adams photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“I have a nice home, the office is close by, and the pay is good.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Quoted in Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye, Kenneth O'Donnell, Dave Powers, and Joseph McCarthy, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970, page 262.
Attributed

Li Bai photo

“Before bed, the bright moon was shining.
Now, I think the ground has a frost covering.
I raise my head … to view the bright moon,
Then I lower my head … and I think of home.”

"Thoughts on a Still Night" (静夜思); in Jean Ward's Li T'ai-po: Remembered (2008), p. 99
Variant: Variant translation:
Before my bed the moonlight glitters
Like frost upon the ground.
I look up to the mountain moon,
Look down and think of home.
Source: "Quiet Night Thought", in Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (2000), p. 723

Margaret Thatcher photo
Amelia Earhart photo

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.”

Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) American aviation pioneer and author

As quoted in Soaring Wings : A Biography of Amelia Earhart (1939) by George Palmer Putnam, p. 83
Cited as Amelia Earhart, "My Husband," Redbook magazine (Sept. 1933) in Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings (1989), p. 101.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo

“The great evil, and it was a hard thing to say, was that English officials in India, with many very honourable exceptions, did not regard the lives of the coloured inhabitants with the same feeling of intense sympathy which they would show to those of their own race, colour, and tongue. If that was the case it was not their fault alone. Some blame must be laid upon the society in which they had been brought up, and upon the public opinion in which they had been trained. It became them to remember that from that place, more than from any other in the kingdom, proceeded that influence which formed the public opinion of the age, and more especially that kind of public opinion which governed the action of officials in every part of the Empire. If they would have our officials in distant parts of the Empire, and especially in India, regard the lives of their coloured fellow-subjects with the same sympathy and with the same zealous and quick affection with which they would regard the lives of their fellow-subjects at home, it was the Members of that House who must give the tone and set the example. That sympathy and regard must arise from the zeal and jealousy with which the House watched their conduct and the fate of our Indian fellow-subjects. Until we showed them our thorough earnestness in this matter—until we were careful to correct all abuses and display our own sense that they are as thoroughly our fellow-subjects as those in any other part of the Empire, we could not divest ourselves of all blame if we should find that officials in India did treat with something of coldness and indifference such frightful calamities as that which had so recently happened in that country.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866
1860s

“In this year also Sulaiman Kirrani, ruler of Bengal, who gave himself the tide of Hazrati A’la, and had conquered die city of Katak-u-Banaras, that mine of heathenism, and having made the stronghold of Jagannath into the home of Islam, held sway from Kamru to Orissa, attained the mercy of God…”

About Sultan Sulaiman Karrani of Bengal (AD 1563-1573) Puri (Orissa) Muntakhabu’t-Tawarikh, translated into English by George S.A. Ranking, Patna Reprint 1973, Vol. I, p. 166 ff
Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

Tomas Kalnoky photo
Julian of Norwich photo
William James photo
Jimmy Fallon photo

“The economy is so bad, Pat Sajak had to take out a home loan just to buy a vowel!”

Jimmy Fallon (1974) American TV Personality

Hosting The Tonight Show, October 31, 2016
Unsourced

Eddie Mair photo

“Our editor came to work today in a vibrant pink shirt. Vibrant. Several members of staff have had to go home sick.”

Eddie Mair (1965) Scottish broadcaster

From the PM Newsletter and Weblog
Source: PM Newsletter. August 2006.

Margrethe II of Denmark photo
Tad Williams photo

“He wanted a home desperately. He was close to the point where he would take a mattress in Hell if the Devil would lend him a pillow.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 14, “A Crown of Fire” (p. 342).

Ezra Koenig photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Christopher Titus photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“Make no mistake about it. I don't want a man in here to go back home thinking otherwise; we are going to win.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

Remarks at a Meeting of the National Alliance of Businessmen (16 March 1968). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28740
1960s

Tom Baker photo
Cesar Chavez photo
Charles Krauthammer photo
Stevie Wonder photo

“Call up, ring once, hang up the phone,
To let me know you made it home,
Don't want nothing to be wrong,
With part-time lover.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Part-Time Lover
Song lyrics, In Square Circle (1985)

Anthony Trollope photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Alain Daniélou photo
Anthony Weiner photo
Richard Cobden photo

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China.
1850s

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Zia Haider Rahman photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 193

John R. Commons photo
Harold Macmillan photo
Robert Fisk photo

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Horace Greeley photo

“III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the White citizens of those States do not expect nor desire chat Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union--(for the truth of which we appeal not only to every Republican residing in those States, but to such eminent loyalists as H. Winter Davis, Parson Brownlow, the Union Central Committee of Baltimore, and to The Nashville Union)--we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason: the most slaveholding sections of Maryland and Delaware being this day, though under the Union flag, in full sympathy with the Rebellion, while the Free-Labor portions of Tennessee and of Texas, though writhing under the bloody heel of Treason, are unconquerably loyal to the Union. So emphatically is this the case, that a most intelligent Union banker of Baltimore recently avowed his confident belief that a majority of the present Legislature of Maryland, though elected as and still professing to be Unionists, are at heart desirous of the triumph of the Jeff. Davis conspiracy; and when asked how they could be won back to loyalty, replied "only by the complete Abolition of Slavery." It seems to us the most obvious truth, that whatever strengthens or fortifies Slavery in the Border States strengthens also Treason, and drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union. Had you from the first refused to recognize in those States, as here, any other than unconditional loyalty--that which stands for the Union, whatever may become of Slavery, those States would have been, and would be, far more helpful and less troublesome to the defenders of the Union than they have been, or now are.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Maithripala Sirisena photo

“Hoda Abdel Hamid (Interviewer for Al Jazeera): President Mathripala Sirisena, thank you for talking to Al Jazeera. Now you've been a year in power, you have received a lot of praise whether it is at home [Sri Lanka] or on the international level. Some go as far as saying 'Sri Lanka is finally on track to fix its democracy.”

Maithripala Sirisena (1951) Sri Lankan politician, 7th President of Sri Lanka

Looking at your second year, what other priorities?
Talk to Al Jazeera - Sri Lankan president: No allegations of war crimes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udGmG-eqJ6o

George Bird Evans photo
Chris Cornell photo
Han-shan photo
John Ehrlichman photo
Warren G. Harding photo
Desmond Morris photo
Gwyneth Paltrow photo
John Fante photo

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

Ask the Dust (1939)

Stephen Foster photo
Paul Weyrich photo

“I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart," and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart." You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.”

Paul Weyrich (1942–2008) American political activist

Letter to Amy Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html (1999-02-16)

Anne Brontë photo
Steve Bannon photo

“There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England…We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war.”

Steve Bannon (1953) American media executive and former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump

Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion by Leslie Kaufman https://nyti.ms/2jCIJ0S (February 16, 2014)

“Auschwitz existed within history, not outside of it. The main lesson I learned there is simple: We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors … Since 1967 it has become obvious that political Zionism has one monolithic aim: Maximum land in Palestine with a minimum of Palestinians on it. This aim is pursued with an inexcusable cruelty as demonstrated during the assault on Gaza. The cruelty is explicitly formulated in the Dahiye doctrine of the military and morally supported by the Holocaust religion.I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of "blood and soil" in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people -- coerced ghettoization behind a "security wall"; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival -- force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”

Hajo Meyer (1924–2014) Dutch physicist

" An Ethical Tradition Betrayed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hajo-meyer/an-ethical-tradition-betr_b_438660.html," huffingtonpost.com, Jan. 27, 2010. Retrieved on March 27, 2010.

Patrick Rothfuss photo
Roger Ebert photo

“It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/my-cousin-vinny-1992 of My Cousin Vinny (13 March 1992)
Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Dylan Moran photo
John D. Carmack photo
Dave Barry photo
Pauline Hanson photo
George W. Bush photo