
Usually youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise, and old age for stability and repose.
Winston Churchill · Article “Consistency in Politics”, Pall Mall, July 1927
Short wisdom quotes of fewer than twenty words, from the sages and the proverbs, each checked to its source.

Winston Churchill · Article “Consistency in Politics”, Pall Mall, July 1927

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. · Northern Securities Co. v. United States (1904)


Winston Churchill · House of Commons, 18 March 1912

The Bible · Ecclesiasticus 30:16

Attributed to Hector Berlioz · A saying of the composer, carried without a fixed source.

Inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Ronald Reagan · The source reads: “We must always deal from strength and insist on verification of every agreement. In my meetings with the General Secretary I repeated several times a Russian proverb—"doveryai no proveryai"—"trust but verify."” · Letter to Gerald B. Broussard (February 15, 1988), quoting the Russian proverb "doveryai no proveryai"

The Bible · 1 Thessalonians 5:21

William Shakespeare · The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597), II, vii


Attributed to Booker T. Washington · Attributed


Joan Collins · The actress on beauty.

The Bible · Ecclesiasticus 6:14. From the Wisdom of Sirach in the Apocrypha.


Winston Churchill · Churchill on pragmatism.

The Bible · Psalms 39:1

The source reads: “Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Everything passes, everything perishes, everything palls.” · French proverb.

Samuel Smiles

Winston Churchill · Churchill on the English language, accepting the Times Literary Award in 1949.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · The source reads: “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.” · A World Split Apart, Harvard commencement address (June 8, 1978)

Julia Child · Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961)

Publilius Syrus · Maxim 185
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