Quotes about hour
page 20

William Cowper photo

“Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 251.

Muhammad photo

“Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated by Abu Huraira, in Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177
Sunni Hadith

Rick Santorum photo

“There is a limitation on debate, which is unlike other bills, for 20 hours, but there is no limitation on amendments. In other words, Republicans if they wanted to, and I suspect they do, could offer literally thousands of amendments and keep Senate in session for weeks and months.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2010-02-27
Fox & Friends Saturday
Fox News
Television, quoted in * 2010-02-27
Santorum's health care stall tactic: "Offer literally thousands of amendments" to keep Senate in session for months
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002270003

Emily Brontë photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“Nothing venture, nothing gain.
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,
Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.”

Wer nichts wagt, gerwinnt nichts.
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend saß,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Bk. II, Ch. 13; translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)

Archibald Lampman photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Kate Bush photo

“I should have been home
Hours ago,
But I'm not here.
But I'm not here…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Hounds of Love (1985), The Ninth Wave

Gabriel García Márquez photo

“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.”

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) American political philosopher

Source: (1974), Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, Redistribution and Property Rights, p. 169

Toni Morrison photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Thomas Moore photo

“And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

The Young May Moon, st. 1.
Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

George Gordon Byron photo
Adelaide Anne Procter photo
Amy Tan photo
John Milton photo
Lydia Maria Child photo
Todor Zhivkov photo

“Now every day, every hour, everywhere there is mat'rial (material) for meeting demonstrations!”

Todor Zhivkov (1911–1998) communist head of state of the People's Republic of Bulgaria

Source: Реч на Тодор Живков. http://www.pureflash.net/todor-zivkov-last-interview.html

William Cobbett photo

“…the existence of a 'system' that was ruining the country. The system of upstarts; of low-bred, low-minded sycophants usurping the stations designed by nature, by reason, by the Constitution, and by the interests of the people, to men of high birth, eminent talents, or great national services; the system by which the ancient Aristocracy and the Church have been undermined; by which the ancient gentry of the kingdom have been almost extinguished, their means of support having been transferred, by the hand of the tax gatherer, to contractors, jobbers and Jews; the system by which but too many of the higher orders have been rendered the servile dependents of the minister of the day, and by which the lower, their generous spirit first broken down, have been moulded into a mass of parish fed paupers. Unless it be the intention, the solemn resolution, to change this system, let no one talk to me of a change of ministry; for, until this system be destroyed…until the filthy tribe of jobbers, brokers and peculators shall be swept from the councils of the nation and the society of her statesmen…there is no change of men, that can, for a single hour, retard the mighty mischief that we dread.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (20 April 1805), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), pp. 27-28, 71-72.

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“Great hour! Spent together, rejoicing and dreaming. Days and years are gathering. We are a still island in the ocean of the world. Beginning and end! Border between life and eternity! Euphoria, fulfillment, existence!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Große Stunde! Mit dem zweiten Menschen, dem anderen verjubelt und verträumt. Tage, Jahre sammeln sich. Eine ruhende stille Insel im Ozean Welt sind wir. Ende und Anfang! Grenze zwischen Leben und Ewigkeit! Rausch, Fülle, Dasein!
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

" Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Reflections_Retirement.html", l. 43 (1795)

“In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped.
And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know.
There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance.
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?
This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog.
We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration.
Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"?
It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"And All of Us So Cool" (p.340)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Vyjayanthimala photo
Martin Rushent photo
Will Cuppy photo
Adam Roberts photo
Giovanni della Casa photo
Harry Graham photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Henri Fantin-Latour photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“I believe that every employee, from the CEO suite to the factory floor, contributes to a business’ success, so everybody should share in the rewards – especially those putting in long hours for little pay.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

William Lisle Bowles photo

“Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.”

William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850) English priest, poet and critic

On Landing at Ostend, from The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 - With Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes by George Gilfillan (1855).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

29 June 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham photo

“Methinks, I see the wanton houres flee,
And as they passe, turne back and laugh at me.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

As quoted in The Encyclopædia Britannica (1910)

William Hazlitt photo

“Horus non numero nisi serenas—"I count only the hours that are serene"—is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" On a Sun-Dial http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Sundial.htm" (New Monthly Magazine, October 1827)
Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

George W. Bush photo

“All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Ultimatum to Iraq (17 March 2003) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/18/iraq.usa1
2000s, 2003

Russell Crowe photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Henry Fielding photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“The immediate purpose with which the Italians and Germans effected the great change in European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli's hour had come.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Introductory note to G.P. Gooch's Annals of Politics and Culture https://archive.org/stream/annalsofpolitics00goociala#page/n5/mode/2up, p. xxxlv (1901)

“Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“These Are Not Psalms”, p. 124
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Rudolf Höss photo

“Burning 2000 people took about 24 hours in the five stoves. Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1700 to 1800. We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

To Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

William Cowper photo

“What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

No. 1, "Walking With God"
Olney Hymns (1779)

“It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 26

Ann Druyan photo
Malcolm Muggeridge photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ian McEwan photo

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

Page 164-165.
Black Dogs (1992)

Thomas Moore photo

“Oh for a tongue to curse the slave
Whose treason, like a deadly blight,
Comes o'er the councils of the brave,
And blasts them in their hour of might!”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part V-VIII: The Fire-Worshippers

Samuel Johnson photo

“His conversation does not show the minute-hand, but he strikes the hour very correctly.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Kearsley, 604
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Johnsoniana

Carl Safina photo
Peter Jennings photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this people and especially of you.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Farewell letter to Fidel Castro (1965)

Edgar Guest photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Dag Hammarskjöld photo
William Gibson photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Tony Blair photo
Friedrich Engels photo
Colin Wilson photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Reginald Heber photo
George William Russell photo

“Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways:
One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Richard Nixon photo

“1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job — best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Notes taken down by CIA director Richard Helms on Nixon's orders for a plan against Salvador Allende of Chile. (15 September 1970); Document reproduced as part of George Washington University's National Security Archive. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/ch26-01.htm
1970s

Robert Hall photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Wilhelm Bittrich photo

“I once spent an hour and a half trying to explain a situation to "Sepp" Dietrich with the aid of a map. It was quite useless. He understood nothing at all.”

Wilhelm Bittrich (1894–1979) German general

Quoted in "The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's S.S." - Page 439 - by Heinz Höhne, R. Barry - 1969

Jane Roberts photo
James Branch Cabell photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Bernice King photo

“When I saw the funeral scene, I just broke down. I ran out of the cabin into the woods, and for nearly 2-1/2 hours, I just cried: "Why, God, did You take him?"”

Bernice King (1963) American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reflection on experience at age sixteen in "Faces of Faith: A Connection Magazine Anthology" (2006), p. 82.

Garth Nix photo
Bruce Cockburn photo

“Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by?”

Bruce Cockburn (1945) Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter

Stealing Fire (1984)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo

“O my brother Futurists! All of you, look at yourselves!.... In the name of that Human Pride we so adore, I proclaim that the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth magnificently, with a single trust of their bulging will, to giants with flawless gestures.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Quote of Marinetti, from the 'Preface' of his novel Mafraka, le Futuriste, Filippo Marinetti, 1909; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313, note 15
1900's

Bernard Cornwell photo
Fernando J. Corbató photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Edgar Guest photo

“Alfie was an organizer. He would telephone the other kids a week before that first practice session (which he euphemistically called spring training), and he would knock on their doors the morning of, and they would look out the windows and say, "Hey, it's snowing," and he would say, "It's not snowing all that hard. See you in a half-hour." So we would gather our tired, cold bodies together, throw on our baseball clothes—old shirts, old pants, sneakers, old baseball gloves—and grab a couple of bats and scuffed-up balls, and we would pile onto the subway and ride to Van Cortland Park. We would run to make sure we'd be first to claim a ball field. Of course we were first. Nobody else was that crazy. My brother would direct practice for a couple of hours, batting practice, catching fungoes, fielding, practicing our curves and drops on the sidelines, fingers aching from contact with batted or thrown baseballs. We threw ourselves across that hard bone of a field so we would be ready when the spring suns finally thawed the ground at our feet. If the still-awake dreams of hunting lions in Africa were the peak moments of my night life, those frozen ball fields of February were the highlights of my days.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

Recalling his late brother, from "Life with Alfie," https://books.google.com/books?id=PWEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA233&dq=%22Alfie+was+an+organizer%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMIiqWJ2oHaxwIVipANCh2Utw2g#v=onepage&q=%22Alfie%20was%20an%20organizer%22&f=false in Orange Coast Magazine (November 1990), pp. 233–234
Other Topics

Muhammad photo

“Anas reported that a Bedouin said to the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, "When will the Hour come?" The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "How have you prepared for it?" He said, "With love of Allah and His Messenger."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

He said, "You will be with the one you love."
Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 369
Sunni Hadith

Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Eugene V. Debs photo

“They who have been reading the capitalist newspapers realize what a capacity they have for lying. We have been reading them lately. They know all about the Socialist Party—the Socialist movement, except what is true. Only the other day they took an article that I had written—and most of you have read it—most of you members of the party, at least—and they made it appear that I had undergone a marvelous transformation. I had suddenly become changed—had in fact come to my senses; I had ceased to be a wicked Socialist, and had become a respectable Socialist, a patriotic Socialist—as if I had ever been anything else. What was the purpose of this deliberate misrepresentation? It is so self-evident that it suggests itself. The purpose was to sow the seeds of dissension in our ranks; to have it appear that we were divided among ourselves; that we were pitted against each other, to our mutual undoing. But Socialists were not born yesterday. They know how to read capitalist newspapers; and to believe exactly the opposite of what they read.
Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Madison Cawein photo

“What magic shall solve us the secret
Of beauty that’s born for an hour?”

Madison Cawein (1865–1914) poet from Louisville, Kentucky

Interpreted.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Charlie Brooker photo