The quote database

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.

Men of the best intentions and soundest views may differ in their construction of some parts of the Constitution, but there are others on which dispassionate reflection can leave no doubt.

Let us then, here and now, recognize this force and resolve to make the most of it—not the boys less, but the girls more.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Ever since then I have had no patience with any school for my race in the South which did not teach its students the dignity of labour.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

As the racial distinction of humanity lies in its social relation, so we find the distinctive gains and losses of humanity to lie also in its social relation. We are more affected by our relation to each other than by our physical environment.

Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

It has always seemed to me, during many years of active private practice, that the first and constant aim of the family physician should be to diffuse the sanitary knowledge which would enable parents to bring up healthy children.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.

Every thought, every word is impressed upon it and carried out in amazing detail.

Life is a mirror, and we find only ourselves reflected in our associates.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The most respectful deference is due to doubts originating in pure patriotism and sustained by venerated authority.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

he kept his mind at full stretch like a bow, and never gave in to old age by growing slack

He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception.

I grew tired and did more harm than good; so, if I met with a difficult point, for example, in algebra, instead of poring over it till I was bewildered, I left it, took my work or some amusing book, and resumed it when my mind was fresh.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

In short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education.