A.P. Herbert Quotes

Patience, time and money accommodate all things.

Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.

Storms make oaks take deeper root.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

Man is everywhere still in chains.

War is death's feast.

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

To a crazy ship, all winds are contrary.

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

When the Foxe preacheth, beware geese.

Persons unmask their evilest qualities when they do quarrel.

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Fine words dresse ill deedes.

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .

Neither praise nor dispraise thy selfe, thy actins serve the turne. [Neither praise nor dispraise thyself; thy actions serve the turn.]

To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth three after.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.

Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.

This doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.

An ignorant friend is worse than a learned foe.

So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.

For want of a naile the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.

Gold opens all locks, no lock will hold against the power of gold.

The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.

Unfortunately most criticism is by poseurs. They use their comments about someone else's work as a platform on which to strike poses. What they're really saying is: "Look at me! Look at me!"

There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.

Be patient and calm; no one can catch fish in anger.

Mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.

Feare nothing but sinne.

My commitment to the Olympics is not a political commitment. It's not a commitment to any particular social system or cultural idea. It is a commitment to sport.

Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.

The people have a vital interest in the conservation of their natural resources; in the prevention of wasteful practices.

If you want to bring the people of this world together, you have to be willing to engage with countries that do not share our [western] democratic values.

Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.