Quotes about worth
page 18

“I experience this high and joyous moment not for myself alone but for those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

People, Age, Peace, Courage

“876. One houre's sleepe before midnight is worth three after.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Sleep

“Toward the bright stars, from the dark ground, he hurled another petition, for whatever it was worth.”

Roger Zelazny book Jack of Shadows

Source: Jack of Shadows (1971), Chapter 2 (p. 19)

Star

“Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving…Col. Muammar Qaddafi's conduct [killing his protesters] is far worse than merely brutal—it is homicidal and sadistic…and even if a headline can't convey all that, it can at least try to capture some of it. Observe, then, what happens when the term is misapplied. The error first robs the language of a useful expression and then ends up by gravely understating the revolting reality it seeks to describe…Far from being brutalized by four decades of domination by a theatrical madman, the Libyan people appear fairly determined not to sink to his level and to be done with him and his horrible kin. They also seem, at the time of writing, to want this achievement to represent their own unaided effort. Admirable as this is, it doesn't excuse us from responsibility. The wealth that Qaddafi is squandering is the by-product of decades of collusion with foreign contractors. The weapons that he is employing against civilians were not made in Libya; they were sold to him by sophisticated nations.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

People, Error, Understanding, Thinking

“One hour of right-down love is worth an age of dully living on.”

Aphra Behn The Rover

The Rover, Part II, Act V.

Love, Age

“Nobody went to see Tideland! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

IMDB profile http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/bio#quotes

People, World, Hope

“To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Source: Household Papers and Stories (1864), Ch. 10.

“Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)

Love, Solitude

“Cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others… [There are] two peculiar scientific virtues of cybernetics that are worth explicit mention. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system… The second peculiar virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in the biological world!”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 4-5

World

“The only good time to say I have diarrhea is during a game of Scrabble, because it's worth a shitload of points.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)

Game, Time

“There are such beings in the world — perhaps one in a thousand — as the creature you and I should think perfection; where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Fanny Knight (1814-11-18) on finding love [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

World, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“Don’t let life pass you by before you realise that it was worth living.”

Hill Zaini (1987) Bruneian singer

Borneo Bulletin, 2 October 2009

Life

“When a man's work is full of life and in harmony with his environment, it becomes a work worth studying.”

Wahbi Al-Hariri (1914–1994) Artist, architect, author

Wahbi al-Hariri-Rifai (1984), Traditional Architecture of Saudi Arabia-Drawings by Wahbi Al-Hariri-Rifai http://books.google.nl/books?id=iAr71OT2S10C&redir_esc=y - Smithsonian Exhibit Booklet - 1984, Washington, D.C.: GDG Exhibits Trust, GGKEY:XRBJ2X83K1K, retrieved on 24 June 2013. Quoted from the back cover of the book.

Life, Study

“This country is worth dying for.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Interview with Glenn Greenwald, 6 June 2013, Part 1

Country

“Love is the source of glory and
Brings worth and honor to a man,
For victory is what Love grants;
Love makes an armed knight valiant.”

Matteo Maria Boiardo book Orlando Innamorato

Però che Amore è quel che dà la gloria,
E che fa l'omo degno ed onorato,
Amore è quel che dona la vittoria,
E dona ardire al cavalliero armato
Bk. 2, Canto 18, st. 3
Orlando Innamorato

Love, Victory

“I fell in love with a Muslim after my husband's death. He was kind and generous in the beginning. But I now feel one shouldn't change one's religion. It is not worth it. Also, I have been accused of being feminist. I am not a feminist, as it is understood. I don't hate men. I feel a woman is most attractive when she surrenders to her man. She is incomplete without a man.”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Suresh Kohli: Still a rebel writer, The Hindu (August 13, 2006)

Love, Death, Men, Hate

“39: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance.”

Arthur Travers Harris (1892–1984) Royal Air Force air marshal

Letter to Sir Norman Bottomley (29 March 1945), quoted in [ Bomber Harris: The Story of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris (1985) by Dudley Saward, p. 294

Personality

“The only society in which it is remotely possible for people to design their lives in the manner Marx fantasizes is one that is incredibly rich and incredibly free. We are nowhere near there yet, but it’s worth pointing out that if you plucked any laborer from another era and toured him or her around America today, they’d think that we were remarkably close.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, A Free People Must Be Virtuous (2018)

People, Thinking

“The American Indians sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $700 in today's money. My point is, that's what Manhattan was worth then. It was useless, it was just a piece of land, like any other piece of land which you can buy today for $700 in many places in the world. Manhattan today is the result of the people who built it, not the original inhabitants who occupied or sold it.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Dinesh D'Souza Takes On The Case For Reparations: 'The Innovation Of America Is The Result Of Capitalism' http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/18/dinesh-dsouza-takes-on-the-case-for-reparations-the-innovation-of-america-is-the-result-of-capitalism/, The Daily Caller (June 18, 2014).

Money, People, World

“Four decades after the mullahs created the Khomeinist republic their revolution has not produced a single poet worth the name. Khomeini and Khamenei, both amateur poets, have produced nothing but frankly embarrassing imitations of classical ghazal without its charm. The last remaining great poets of the pre-revolution era are all in exile, among them Hushang Ebtehaj, Manuchehr Yektai, Yadollah Roya’i, Esmail Khoi, Muhammad Jalali, and Hadi Khorsandi. Inside Iran, some promising younger poets such as Sa’id Sultanpour, Heydar Mehregan, and, more recently, Hashem Shaabani were executed by the regime but gained posthumous popularity greater than any officially endorsed poet. At the same time, almost all of Iran’s poets, from the 9th century to this day, are either censored or, in rare cases, totally banned by the mullahs. Most poets of the past 100 years are on various blacklists established by the oxymoronically named Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture. And, yet, Khamenei calls on the government to prepare a plan, and allocate resources, to increase the production of poetry as if it were the same as centrifuges churning out enriched uranium.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

Time, Past

“I've come up with the three things you never want to hear at your kid's parent/teacher conference. Number one: "You're only responsible for the first $10,000 worth of damage." Number two: "We have medication for this." And number three: "It was more than an ounce and he was less than 100 yards from the school."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography (2002)

School, Parent, Teachers

“What a wonderful thing is to be able to contribute to the restoration of someone's health. It's not only a feeling that I'm worth something, but that I have something to contribute.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 165

Health, Feeling

“Science and art may invent splendid modes of illuminating the apartments of the opulent; but these are all poor and worthless compared with the common light which the sun sends into all our windows, which he pours freely, impartially over hill and valley, which kindles daily the eastern and western sky; and so the common lights of reason, and conscience, and love, are of more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which give celebrity to a few.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Love, Art, Light, Science

“I disagree with him on some of the issues. But when he came out and said he’s willing to audit the Federal Reserve, I said, "He’s worth supporting," especially since he’s not afraid to be politically incorrect. That’s a huge breath of fresh air, I wish he would renounce his support for the NSA.”

Ben Garrison American political cartoonist

Lakeside Cartoonist a Player on the Political World Stage http://www.dailyinterlake.com/archive/article-c3636174-3b30-11e6-8943-1f17ebd0c321.html (June 25, 2016)

Support

“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

Search, Intelligence

“A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.”

Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) American film producer (1879-1974).

A misreporting of an actual quote praising the trustworthiness of a colleague: "His verbal contract is worth more than the paper it's written on". The identity of the colleague is variously reported as Joseph M. Schenk in Paul F. Boller, John George, They Never Said It (1990), p. 42, or as Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Carol Easton, The Search for Sam Goldwyn (1976). Goldwyn himself was reportedly aware of - and pleased by - the misattribution.
Misattributed

Funny

“If the methods you employ are good, then what’s the point of all this reasoning and argument? A few drops of credendium, a single squirt in the eyes, and I applaud your every word with enthusiasm, you have my full approval, my esteem. If those methods are good. Yet apparently you yourself are not convinced of their worth, preferring simple, old-fashioned hot air and rhetoric, wasting words on me instead of reaching for the atomizer! Apparently you’re well aware that the triumph of psychem is a sham, and that you will be standing on the field alone, a conqueror with a bad case of heartburn.”

Stanisław Lem book The Futurological Congress

The Futurological Congress (1971)

Fashion

“Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

St. 4. <br class="br"> Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Wisdom, Star

“Instead the economy is a subsystem of the finite biosphere that supports it. When the economy’s expansion encroaches too much on the surrounding biosphere, we begin to sacrifice natural capital (animals, plants, minerals and fossil fuels) that is worth more than the manmade capital (roads, factories, appliances) added by ‘growth’.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

Support, Nature, Animals

“So they spoke, and both springing down from behind their horses
gripped each other's hands and exchanged the promise of friendship;
but Zeus the son of Kronos stole away the wits of Glaukos
who exchanged with Diomedes the son of Tydeus armour
of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth the worth of a hundred.”

Homér Iliad

VI. 232–236 (tr. R. Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Friendship, Spring, Horse

“Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to see something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it, something worth thinking about to occupy your mind.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

A Treasury of Inspirational Thoughts (2004) by S.P. Sharma, p. 41.
Disputed

Thinking, Time

“But when it rains, it rains on all our houses, we all get cold when it snows. When a storm rolls in, huddled up against our windows, we all feel the fear when a strong wind blows, While on this earth, we’re all of equal worth.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"All of Us"
A Picnic of Poems in Allah's Green Garden (2011)

Fear, Feeling, Strong, Housing

“There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1992Aug19.041614.6963@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

World

“You could grind a dog's head and a shoe together into a paste and spoon-feed it to me, and I'd probably think it was chicken liver pate, provided I kept my eyes closed, and provided you plucked all the dog hair out beforehand, and provided you'd managed to find a pestle and mortar big enough to mash it all up in, and provided - look, it wouldn't be worth it. I'm just saying I can't taste anything. There's no need to get carried away. What's the matter with you? You're an idiot.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

On his lack of tastebuds due to a bad cold.
[Screen Burn, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2193905,00.html, The Guardian, 20 October 2007, 2008-07-30]
Guardian columns, Screen Burn

Dogs, Shoe, Thinking, Past

“When we see men of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

James Legge, translation (1893)
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
Dim Cheuk Lau translation (1979)
When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
As quoted in Liberating Faith : Religious Voices for Justice, Peace, and Ecological Wisdom (2003) by Roger S. Gottlieb, p. 24
The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter IV

Men, Thinking

“Susan [Silver] gives me a huge amount of room to be that recluse, and also the incentive to not be. It’s worth a lot to see her be excited about being around someone who’s not afraid of his shadow. It’s good for her. She digs it. But we’re becoming more alike. When she comes home to me from a day at the office, where she’s talking to people from all over the world about all sorts of important things… well, I probably haven’t answered the phone in seventy-two hours. She knows that when she comes home she’s going to get privacy, because I’m not like ‘These are my South American friends and… honey, have you ever really listened to that first Van Halen album?’ She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. People are sort of perplexed, as to how this could possibly work in this grunge-music, super-druggy era where everybody is so emotionally screwed up. Not only is Soundgarden not OD’ing on heroin, but the singer’s wife manages the band, there’s no weird Yoko Ono trip, and she’s not trying to make us dress up like lions and unicorns.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked if intimacy is an issue in his marriage to Soundgarden's manager Susan Silver ** Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/, <br class="br">Soundgarden Era

People, World, Music, Home

“Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.”

Emo Philips (1956) American comedian

As quoted in The Fourth — And By Far The Most Recent — 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said : Many Given Heightened Piquancy by Nineteenth-Century Line Cuts (1990) edited by Robert Byrne, 32

“Tea heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down."”

William S. Burroughs book Junkie

In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler.
Junkie (1953)

Money, Way, Light, Tea

“No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 113–126.
Collected Works

“A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.”

Philip K. Dick book VALIS

VALIS (1981)

God

“What is to be seen in this fallen world, which is false and filled with vices, is full of disputes and is governed by the sins of deceitful and wicked humans? Only Rama is worth seeing, whose flocks of hair cover his lotus-like face, who is completely blissful, who has the form of a child, and who is the giver of liberation.”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

kiṃ dṛṣṭavyaṃ patitajagati vyāptadoṣe'pyasatye
māyācārāvratatanubhṛtāṃ pāparājadvicāre ।
dṛṣṭavyo'sau cikuranikuraiḥ pūrṇavaktrāravindaḥ
pūrṇānando dhṛtaśiśutanuḥ rāmacandro mukundaḥ ॥
[Aneja, Mukta, J. K., Kaul, Abraham, George, 2005, Abilities Redefined – Forty Life Stories Of Courage And Accomplishment, All India Confederation of the Blind, Delhi, India, Shri Ram Bhadracharyaji – A Religious Head With A Vision, http://www.aicb.in/images/success_story.pdf, 25 April 2011, 66–68]
[Nagar, Shanti Lal, The Holy Journey of a Divine Saint: Being the English Rendering of Swarnayatra Abhinandan Granth, Acharya Divakar, Sharma, Siva Kumar, Goyal, Surendra Sharma, Susila, B. R. Publishing Corporation, First, Hardback, New Delhi, India, 2002, 8176462888]

World, Falseness

“If one day I have a stroke, then that will tell me that being ROC Culture Minister is not worth it for me. As long as I am still in this position, I will definitely do my best until one day when I decide that it is not worth it anymore.”

Lung Ying-tai (1952) Taiwanese politician

Lung Ying-tai (2013) cited in " PTS row 'worst' int'l scandal: Lung http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2013/05/23/379324/PTS-row.htm" on The China Post, 23 May 2013

“Let Rome be glorious on the earth,
The centre of Italian worth.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book XII, p. 472

“I often find myself going back to Darwin's saying about the duration of a man's friendships being one of the best measures of his worth.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

from Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning by Anne Thackeray Ritchie http://www.victorianweb.org/books/aplin.html (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1893) page 170 <br class="br">Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

Friendship

“Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren—or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 36)

Life, Women, Beauty, Music

“In the world as we find it, even the barest requirements of a life worth living cannot all be always met in full. Toppling a tyranny may trigger civil war. Protecting a broad range of liberal freedoms may result in the regime that guarantees them being short lived. At the same time, supporting a strong state as a bulwark against anarchy may worsen the abuse of power. Wise policy can temper these conflicts. It cannot hope to overcome them.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Modus Vivendi' (p.28)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Life, War, World, Hope

“If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” (1982)

Literature

“Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 18.

Parting

“I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Men, Imagination, Motivation, Idea

“When Elizabeth Blackwell studied medicine and put up her sign in New York, she was regarded as fair game, and was called a "she doctor." The college that had admitted her closed its doors afterward against other women; and supposed they were shut out forever. But Dr. Blackwell was a woman of fine intellect, of great personal worth and a level head. How good it was that such a woman was the first doctor! She was well equipped by study at home and abroad, and prepared to contend with prejudice and every opposing thing.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Women, Home, Game, Study

“I hold no dream of fortune vast,
Nor seek undying fame.
I do not ask when life is past
That many know my name.I may not own the skill to rise
To glory's topmost height,
Nor win a place among the wise,
But I can keep the right.And I can live my life on earth
Contented to the end,
If but a few shall know my worth
And proudly call me friend.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Success.
Just Folks (1917)

Life, Dreams, Past

“The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Said in 1936, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, prologue, by William V. Holtz (1993).

Question, Effort, Freedom, Personality

“"The American man is a failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best — Herbert or his wife?" The men laughed a little — not much! Each probably made allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior woman. Some one afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all possible average; he could not lay his hands on another half-dozen their equals.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Women, Men, Way, Home

“If there is one thing in this wonderful world of ours that is worth preserving, defending, and promoting, it is the White Race.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

World

“I think I entirely agree with you on the subject of Portugal; all the probabilities were, and in my opinion still are, against eventual success there. I have no faith even in the promised victory…I could not deny that such a success would be worth the sacrifices we had made for it. But a doubtful or indecisive victory, and protracted operations, I should think little less ruinous (I am not sure they would not be more so) than an immediate defeat.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Grenville (9 November 1810), quoted in Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815 (Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 136-137.
1810s

Faith, Thinking, Success, Victory

“Settle in your mind, that no sermon is worth much in which the Lord is not the principal speaker. There may be poetry, refinement, historic truth, moral truth, pathos, and all the charms of rhetoric; but all will be lost, for the purposes of preaching, if the word of the Lord is not the staple of the discourse.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 477.

Truth

“Gentlemen, ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. [Great applause. ] But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet tonight as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought. [Loud and prolonged cheers. ] And while we have life to meet and grasp the hand of a comrade, we will stand by the great truths of the war. ["Good," "good," and loud cheers. ] Many convictions have sunk so deep into our hearts that we can never forget them. Think of the elevating spirit of the war itself. We gathered the boys from all our farms and shops and stores and schools and homes, from all over the Republic. They went forth unknown to fame, but returned enrolled on the roster of immortal heroes. [Great applause. ] They went in the spirit of the soldiers of Henry at Agincourt, of whom he said. 'For he today that sheds his blood with me. Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile. This day shall gentle his condition.'”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech to the 'Boys in Blue' (1880)

Life, Men, War, Truth

“It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."”

H. G. Wells book The Open Conspiracy

The Open Conspiracy (1928)

Life, People, Stupidity, World

“Now I know, I know that every uh speaker comes before you and says they identify with Columbus but I really mean it. Think about it; the guy was faced with questions at home about whether his global efforts were worth a darn. Some critics want him to cut his voice short… he even faced the threat of mutiny (laughs) and yet Columbus persevered and won. Not a bad analogy in my (laughs) view so I know this isn't political. Now I admit Columbus also had to worry all about at that time about a lack of wind. I… I don't have that problem with Congress.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Address to the Knights of Columbus (5 August 1992) https://www.c-span.org/video/?30685-1/bush-campaign-speech

Guy, Home, Question, Problem

“Fine thoughts and moral dissertations from men who have not worked and suffered may be read, but they will be forgotten. No religion, no Ethical philosophy is worth anything, if the teacher has not lived the "life of an apostle," and been ready to die "the death of a martyr." "Not in passivity [the passive affects], but in activity, lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity"”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

IX. 16
The Philosophy of Antoninus

Life, Death, Men, Lie

“As you serve others, you can inspire others. I’ve been inspired by the examples of many selfless servants. Winston Churchill, a leader of courage and resolve, inspired me during my Presidency—and, for that matter, in the post-presidency. Like Churchill, I now paint. Unlike Churchill, the painting isn’t worth much without the signature. In 1941, he gave a speech to the students of his old school during Britain’s most trying times in World War II. It wasn’t too long, and it is well-remembered. Prime Minister Churchill urged, 'Never give in… in nothing, great or small, large or petty. Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense'. I hope you’ll remember this advice. But there’s a lesser-known passage from that speech that I also want to share with you. 'These are not dark days. These are great days. The greatest our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race'. When Churchill uttered these words, many had lost hope in Great Britain’s chance for survival against the Nazis. Many doubted the future of freedom. Today, some doubt America’s future, and they say our best days are behind us. I say, given our strengths—one of which is a bright new generation like you—these are not dark days. These are great days.”

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

2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)

God, War, World, School

“I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

World, Hope, Way, Problem

“The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced.It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics.The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance"
Source: http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/coping-with-ignorance/

Way, Understanding, Time

“We are here to become great men and women, and with that purpose in view, we must eliminate everything in our religion and philosophy that tends to make the human mind a dependent weakling. If you would serve God and be truly religious, do not kneel before God, but learn to walk with God, and do something tangible every day to increase the happiness of mankind. This is religion that is worth while, and it is such religion alone that can please the Infinite.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter 12, p. 184–185

Women, Men, God, Happiness

“But I account it worth
All pangs of fair hopes crost—
All loves and honors lost,—
To gain the heavens, at cost
Of losing earth.”

Theodore Tilton (1835–1907) American newspaper editor

Sir Marmaduke's Musings, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love, Hope

“Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group.”

Barbara Seaman (1935–2008) American journalist

[A Dozen Who Have Risen to Prominence, The New York Times, 2007-10-15, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E1D6153BF931A15755C0A961958260&scp=1&sq=a+dozen+who+have+risen+to+prominence&st=nyt, 2008-02-09]
In response to the question “What do you think a woman's chief health concern should be?”

Training

“Colour is what gives jewels their worth. They light up and enhance the face. Nothing is more elegant than a black skirt and sweater worn with a sparkling multi-stoned necklace.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Source: Maria Doulton Simply brilliant: Cher Dior lights up Paris http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/jewellery/2928/simply-brilliant-cher-dior-lights-up-paris.html. The Telegraph, 16 August 2011

Light

“The systems view of nature and man is clearly non- anthropocentric, but it is not non-humanistic for all that. It allows us to understand that man is one species of system in a complex and embracing hierarchy of nature, and at the same time it tells us that all systems have value and intrinsic worth. They are goal-oriented, self-maintaining, and self-creating expressions of nature's penchant for order and adjustment. The status of man is not lessened by admitting the amoeba as his kin, nor by recognizing that sociocultural systems are his supersystems. Seeing himself as a connecting link in a complex natural hierarchy cancels man's anthropocentrism, but seeing the hierarchy itself as an expression of self-ordering and self-creating nature bolsters his self-esteem and encourages his humanism.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 118.

Understanding, Nature, Time

“First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

In a nationally televised speech on (25 April 2005), San Diego Union Tribune http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050426/news_1n26russia.html. <br class="br">2000 - 2005

“Roger: It’s a little more freedom, sort of, but it’s more work, too, to keep up with all the little things. It’s kinda worth it, I guess; nobody really buys CDs so it really doesn’t matter.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Freedom

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 146
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Life, Fate, World, Feeling

“Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow—never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life, Lie, Beauty, Failure

“Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.
Someone else was paying.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 16 (p. 217)

Men

“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Shakespeare once more
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890)

“I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1799-01-21) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Thinking, Waiting

“Perseverance is the master impulse of the firmest souls, the discipline of the noblest virtues, and the guaranty of acquisitions the most invigorating in their use and inestimable in their worth.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 450.

Soul, Perseverance

“The Jews are the enemy of National Socialism. From the time of their emancipation their methods were directed to the annihilation of the folkish and moral worth of the German people and to replace a national and responsible ideology with international nihilism. It was really they who stabbed the Army in the back which broke the resistance of the Germans in the First World War. The Jews are the enemy with whom no armistice or peace can be made. We will smite the Jews where we meet them and whoever goes along with them must take the consequences.”

Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892–1946) austrian chancellor and politician, convicted of crimes against humanity in Nuremberg Trials and sentenced …

Speech in Amsterdam, March 12, 1941. Quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 468 - by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997

War, People, World, Peace

“Remember when I told you, for the first time? You nearly threw me off the roof—”
“I thought you deserved it. You know, it’s an opinion I return to from time to time, whether or not a roof is available.”
“You’re a difficult woman, Sabetha. But then, difficult women are the only ones worth falling in love with.”
“How would you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been after anyone else—”
“That part’s easy. I started with the most difficult woman possible, so there was never any need to look any further.”
“You’re trying to be charming.” She squeezed his hand once, then pulled away. “I choose not to be entirely charmed, Locke Lamora.”
“Not entirely?”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

“Not entirely. Not yet.”
Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 8 “The Five-Year Game: Infinite Variation” section 11 (p. 483)

Love, Women, Time, Parting

“I am what I am
I am my own special creation
So come take a look
Give me the hook or the ovation
It's my world that I want to have a little pride in
My world and it's not a place I have to hide in
Life's not worth a damn till you can say
Hey world I am what I am.”

Jerry Herman (1931–2019) American composer and lyricist

"I Am What I Am," from La Cage aux Folles (1983) http://www.bassey.co.uk/blog/shirley_bassey/2006_08_07_peggyblog.html

Life, World

“I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered that he thought I, or at least some essential if somewhat abstract principle within me, was worth saving.I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happened to resemble the backstage of an opera house.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 203).

Soul, Nature, Reality, Sense

“Man's conception of what is most worth knowing and reflecting upon, of what may best compel his scholarly energies, has changed greatly with the years. His earliest impressions were of his own insignificance and of the stupendous powers and forces by which he was surrounded and ruled. The heavenly fires, the storm-cloud and the thunderbolt, the rush of waters and the change of seasons, all filled him with an awe which straightway saw in them manifestations of the superhuman and the divine. Man was absorbed in nature, a mythical and legendary nature to be sure, but still the nature out of which science was one day to arise. Then, at the call of Socrates, he turned his back on nature and sought to know himself; to learn the secrets of those mysterious and hidden processes by which he felt and thought and acted. The intellectual centre of gravity had passed from nature to man. From that day to this the goal of scholarship has been the understanding of both nature and man, the uniting of them in one scheme or plan of knowledge, and the explaining of them as the offspring of the omnipotent activity of a Creative Spirit, the Christian God. Slow and painful have been the steps toward the goal which to St. Augustine seemed so near at hand, but which has receded through the intervening centuries as the problems grew more complex and as the processes of inquiry became so refined that whole worlds of new and unsuspected facts revealed themselves. Scholars divided into two camps. The one would have ultimate and complete explanations at any cost; the other, overcome by the greatness of the undertaking, held that no explanation in a large or general way was possible. The one camp bred sciolism; the other narrow and helpless specialization.
At this point the modern university problem took its rise; and for over four hundred years the university has been striving to adjust its organization so that it may most effectively bend its energies to the solution of the problem as it is. For this purpose the university's scholars have unconsciously divided themselves into three types or classes: those who investigate and break new ground; those who explain, apply, and make understandable the fruits of new investigation; and those philosophically minded teachers who relate the new to the old, and, without dogma or intolerance, point to the lessons taught by the developing human spirit from its first blind gropings toward the light on the uplands of Asia or by the shores of the Mediterranean, through the insights of the world's great poets, artists, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and priests, to its highly organized institutional and intellectual life of to-day. The purpose of scholarly activity requires for its accomplishment men of each of these three types. They are allies, not enemies; and happy the age, the people, or the university in which all three are well represented. It is for this reason that the university which does not strive to widen the boundaries of human knowledge, to tell the story of the new in terms that those familiar with the old can understand, and to put before its students a philosophical interpretation of historic civilization, is, I think, falling short of the demands which both society and university ideals themselves may fairly make.
A group of distinguished scholars in separate and narrow fields can no more constitute a university than a bundle of admirably developed nerves, without a brain and spinal cord, can produce all the activities of the human organism.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Scholarship and service : the policies of a national university in a modern democracy https://archive.org/details/scholarshipservi00butluoft (1921)

Life, Men, God, Pain

“Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it.
But the purified gladness of which I speak is not dependent on these accidents. It is the mark of the ripest wisdom, and is based on the conviction, gained through experience, that life is worth living, that the victory is assured, and that the ends we pursue are of such excellence as to be incapable of ultimate defeat.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Life, Wisdom, Happiness, Spring

“As Soviet power grows, there will be a greater aversion to Communist parties everywhere. So we must practice the techniques of withdrawal. Never appear in the foreground; let our friends do the work. We must always remember that one sympathizer is generally worth more than a dozen militant Communists. A university professor, who without being a party member, lends himself to the interests of the Soviet Union, is worth more than a hundred men with party cards. A writer of reputation, or a retired general, are worth more than 500 poor devils who don't know any better than to get themselves beaten up by the police. Every man has his value, his merit. The writer who, without being a party member, defends the Soviet Union, the union leader who is outside our ranks but defends Soviet international policy, is worth more than a thousand party members.”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 20-21.
Misattributed

Men, Universe, Appearance