A.P. Herbert Quotes

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

To stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence.

Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.

The tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.

That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.

The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.

Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.

The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

Each life creates endless ripples.

Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.

Noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers.

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.

Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.

You never have to know all the answers because you won't be asked all the questions.

If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel.

When better business decisions are made, economists won't make them.

The home is where part of the family waits until the others are through with the car.

Hope clouds observation.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

Sometimes the best gain is to lose.

I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

Do well and right and let the world sink.

A difficulty for every solution.

Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

The so-called symptoms of disease are manifestations of an inherent principle of the organism to restore healthy function and to resist offending agents and influences.

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

Laugh not too much; the witty man laughs least: For wit is news only to ignorance. Lesse at thine own things laugh; lest in the jest Thy person share, and the conceit advance.

The resolved mind hath no cares.

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.