H.P. Oliver Quotes

I couldn't despise a man more than George W. Bush.

What Chavez has done [in Venezuela] is that he has brought extreme poverty to an end.

I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult.

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,-- Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive,-- Snuffy old drone from the German hive.

America is the only place where man is full-grown!

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

To know is not less than to feel.

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.

What a new face courage puts on everything. - Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

War? War is an organized bore.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

I think my strength in teaching and what I get a lot of good feedback on is going towards the students and asking them what they are about. It's about putting your own personality into the work.

Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither my friend, neither. It's number one. (Fagin)

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst.Death isn't just an idea.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

Still, what I want in my lifeis to be willingto be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of factsand maybe evento float a littleabove this difficult world.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world.And live your life.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.