M.K. Alexander Quotes

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

I do not steal victory.

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

I’ve lived to bury my desires, And see my dreams corrode with rust; Now all that’s left are fruitless fires That burn my empty heart to dust.

Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.

Ambition without principle never was long under the guidance of good sense.

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.

You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man's own eyes when they look upon his own person.

I want to understand you, I study your obscure language.

First words on the first telephone - "Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you."

It is the Press which has corrupted our political morals - and it is to the Press we must look for the means of our political regeneration.

I would die to preserve the law upon a solid foundation; but take away liberty, and the foundation is destroyed.

Nature makes penicillin; I just found it.

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fall of course.

Learn to think continentally.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.

It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.

We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.

The honor of a nation is its life. Deliberately to abandon it is to commit an act of political suicide.

My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you.

One day every major city in America will have a telephone.

The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge right or make good decision.

As long as there is one heart on Earth where I still live, my memory will not die.

You've got to know the rules to break them. That's what I'm here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.

Thus people--so it seems to me-- Become good friends from sheer ennui.

The world needs fantasy, not reality. We have enough reality today

Love passed, the Muse appeared, the weather of mind got clarity new-found; now free, I once more weave together emotion, thought, and magic sound.

God has strewn our paths with wonders and we certainly should not go through life with our eyes shut

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.

The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.

There is no better designer than nature

Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung derer, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben. (The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world)

Suggested remedy for the common cold: A good gulp of whiskey at bedtime-it's not very scientific, but it helps.

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands . . . the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

People don't want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination.

Penicillin sat on a shelf for ten years while I was called a quack.

We are all too much inclined, I think, to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked.

Moscow... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! What store of riches it imparts!