The 100 Best Quotes of All Time

The greatest quotations in human history

Obviously, if you're talking about the 100 best quotations of all time out of the millions and millions of notable quotations uttered across all of human history, the list is going to have to be a bit arbitrary. So, I went for quotes that had the most personal impact on me. The ones that really stuck with me, changed how I thought, or alternately, were just so incredibly cool that I couldn't stop thinking about them. These are those quotes. May they serve you as well they have served me. (PS: Feel free to ask for an explanation in more depth on any of these quotes in the comments section!)

1) "David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.'" — 1 Samuel 17:45, 46, 47

2) "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." — 2 Timothy 4:3

3) "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." — Lord Acton

4) "Losers find excuses, winners find solutions." — Anonymous

5) "Find something you love to do so much that you’d do it for free and find a way to make it into a career." — Anonymous

6) "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." — Anonymous

7) "Pigs don’t know pigs stink." — Anonymous

8) "If you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve it." — Anonymous

9) "It’s likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream." — Anonymous

10) "Everybody wants to be a BEAST until it's time to do what real beasts do." — Anonymous

11) "Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else." — Henry Ward Beecher

12) "Politics is downstream from culture." — Andrew Breitbart

13) "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." — George W. Bush in the rubble of the WTC

14) "People like people who help them like themselves." — Dale Carnegie

15) "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." — G.K. Chesterton

16) "Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." — Winston Churchill

17) "Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour!’" — Winston Churchill

18) Mongol General: "What is best in life?" Conan: "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" — Conan (1982)

19) "Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen." — Sean Connery in the movie, "The Rock"

20) "In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is." — Ann Coulter

21) "Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards – why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!" — Ann Coulter

22) "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have." — Leonardo Da Vinci

23) "Attraction is not a choice." — David DeAngelo

24) "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" — Steven Decatur

25) "Masculinity is tragic. Masculinity is a lifelong struggle; a gauntlet run against nature and other men to demonstrate virility and prove one’s worthiness as a man in the eyes of other men. Masculinity is a challenge to honor that ends only in death- a challenge to win coupled with a guarantee that, eventually, even the best man will lose." — Jack Donavan

26) "Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace." — Will and Ariel Durant

27) "No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." — Will and Ariel Durant

28) "There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip." — English Proverb

29) "If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked." — Epictetus

30) "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." — Gustave Flaubert

31) "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." — Ben Franklin

32) "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." — Ben Franklin

33) "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Galatians 6:7

34) "Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." — Jerzy Gregorek

35) "When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality, and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value, and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler than saying something like, ‘Please lower my taxes.'" — Greg Gutfeld

36) "There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch." — Robert Heinlein

37) "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" — Patrick Henry

38) "Evolution is the DNA of a continued existence. Those who don't evolve become the subject of a ‘Whatever Happened To’ story." — Paul Heyman

39) "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." — Eric Hoffer

40) "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." — Hosea 8:7

41) "Duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather." — Japanese imperials rescript to sailors and soldiers

42) "For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son; that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." — John 3:16

43) "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way." — The “Father of the American Navy” John Paul Jones during the Revolutionary War

44) "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." — Basketball player, Michael Jordan

45) "Four things greater than all things are, – Women and Horses and Power and War." — Rudyard Kipling

46) "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." — Charles Krauthammer

47) "Wait too long and life will pass you by. Don’t make the mistake of thinking everything will give you a second chance." — Ed Latimore

48) "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." — C.S. Lewis

49) "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." — C.S. Lewis

50) "Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives." — C.S. Lewis

51) "Winning is not a sometime thing: it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." — Vince Lombardi

52) "And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure." — Niccolo Machiavelli

53) "And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good." — Niccolo Machiavelli

54) “From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

55) "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." — James Madison

56) "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." — Abraham Maslow

57) "If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up." — Abraham Maslow

58) "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s." — Matthew 22:21

59) "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane." — Megan McCardle

60) "That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger." — Friedrich Nietzsche

61) "People living deeply have no fear of death." — Anais Nin

62) "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P.J. O’Rourke

63) "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." — George Orwell

64) "I do not fear failure. I only fear the ‘slowing up’ of the engine inside of me, which is pounding, saying, ‘Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?’" — George S. Patton

65) "A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week." — George S. Patton

66) "This too shall pass." — Persian adage

67) "The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort." — Plato

68) "Why don’t lazy people ever get out of the house? What are they afraid of… Lions?" — Proverbs 26:13

69) "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." — Psalms 23:4

70) "I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless. But not men." — Mario Puzo

71) "When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns, and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot." — Ayn Rand

72) "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." — Ronald Reagan

73) "If you’re explaining, you’re losing." — Ronald Reagan

74) "…Perhaps only 45% of success is showing up, while another 45% of success is asking. Asking is the simplest, most efficient, and potentially most rewarding action a person can take. I’ve become such a believer in the power of asking that I am compelled to share with you my Ten Sacred Rules of Success:

Rule No. 1: Ask

Rule No. 2: Ask again.

Rule No. 3: Ask again.

Rule No. 4: Ask again.

Rule No. 5: Ask again.

Rule No. 6: Ask again.

Rule No. 7: Ask again.

Rule No. 8: Ask again.

Rule No. 9: Ask again.

Rule No. 10: Ask again.

I never cease to be amazed by how many times I’ve achieved results simply because I took the trouble (and in many cases, had the gall or audacity) to ask — and kept asking until I got the ‘yes’ I was after." — Robert Ringer

75) "The degree of complications and unhappiness in a person’s life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is." — Robert Ringer

76) "The secret to bluffing is to not bluff." — Robert Ringer

77) "…Consider the possibility that man is to God as a dog is to man, and a dog is to man as a flea is to a dog, i.e., the man, the dog, and the flea, who are merely tagging along for the ride, have neither the faintest idea as to why their masters do what they do nor the means to ever understand why. The question then becomes: Is God indifferent to us, as the dog is to the flea, or does He allow us to suffer for reasons we do not understand? When someone takes his dog to the veterinarian, the dog has no idea why his master allows pain to be inflicted on him. In the same way, perhaps, God doesn’t always give us what we want, but He knows what we need." — Robert Ringer

78) "Nothing in life has any real meaning except the meaning you give it." — Tony Robbins

79) "If you question anything enough, you’ll begin to doubt it." — Tony Robbins

80) "Your emotions are nothing but biochemical storms in your brain and you are in control of them at any point in time." — Tony Robbins

81) "Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better." — Jim Rohn

82) "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." — Teddy Roosevelt

83) "Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far." — Teddy Roosevelt

84) "It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat." — Teddy Roosevelt

85) "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones." — Donald Rumsfeld

86) "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." — Gen William T. Sherman

87) "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." — Adam Smith

88) "Tolerant, but not stupid! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it! …"Tolerate" means you’re just putting up with it! You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane, or you tolerate a bad cold. It can still piss you off!" — South Park

89) "The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." — Thomas Sowell

90) "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." — Thomas Sowell

91) "When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." — Thomas Sowell

92) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." — Thomas Sowell

93) "Naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor. The contrary opinion ‘violence never solves anything’ is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay…They pay with their lives and their freedom." — From the movie, Starship Troopers

94) "It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken." — Margaret Thatcher

95) "I hate the term ‘Mixed Signals’ or ‘Mixed Messages’. More often than not there’s nothing ‘Mixed’ being communicated and rather it’s a failure (willful or not) to read what a woman is communicating to a man. The average guy tends to ‘get’ exactly what a woman has implied with her words, but it takes practice to read her behavior and then more practice in self-control to apply it to his own interpretation. When a woman goes from hot to cold and back again, this IS the message – she’s got buyers remorse, you’re not her first priority, she’s deliberating between you and what she perceives is a better prospect, you were better looking when she was drunk, etc. – the message isn’t the ‘what ifs’, the message IS her own hesitation and how her behavior manifests it. Ten dates before sex? This IS the message. Canceling dates? Flaking? Strong interest to weak interest? This IS the message. Women with high-interest level (IL) won’t confuse you." — Rollo Tomassi

96) "All right Clanton, you called down the thunder and now you’ve got it. You see that? It says United States Marshall. Take a good look at him Ike because that’s how you’re gonna end up. The cowboys are finished you understand me? I see a red sash; I kill the man wearing it. So run you cur, run, tell all the other curs that law is coming, you tell them I’m coming, and Hell’s coming with me you hear? Hell’s coming with me." — Tombstone (1993)

97) "Always protect against the downside – the upside will take care of itself." — Donald Trump

98) "It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog." — Mark Twain

99) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." — A paraphrase of Voltaire

100) "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country." — George Washington to officers of the Continental Army who seemed to be plotting insurrection after Congress refused to give them aid. According to the book, "The Wars of America," many of the men were "overcome" and began "openly weeping." They then agreed to "leave their problems in Washington’s hands."

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