R.S. Thomas Quotes
You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don't make bad decisions based on empathy.
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.
Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.
A great proportion of the wretchedness which has embittered married life, has originated in a negligence of trifles.
The biggest impact my father had on my life was teaching the importance of literacy.
We are overwhelmed as it is, with an infinite abundance of vaunted medicaments, and here they add another one.
The generality have considered that disease is but a confused and disordered effort in Nature, thrown down from her proper state, and defending herself in vain.
Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.
If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot.
We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.
The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.
Ill husbandry braggeth To go with the best: Good husbandry baggeth Up gold in his chest.
What if we have more of the rough file, if we have less rust! Afflictions carry away nothing but the dross of sin.
Are there not millions of us who would rather go sleeping to hell; than sweating to heaven?
We spend our years with sighing; it is a valleyof tears; but death is the funeral of all our sorrows.
Affliction may be lasting, but it is not everlasting. Affliction was a sting, but withal a wing: sorrow shall soon fly away.
Put First Things First! These four words cover an entire philosophy which can be applied with profit by every business leader, by every executive and by every employee.
Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.
What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?
How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.
There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.
I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.
But one should pray in one's heart during a sacred ceremony; this is the purpose of the ceremony, to purify the participants both inside and outside.
Ours is supposed to be a government in which classes and distinctions melt into a harmonious whole. Until we reach this ideal of government, we will be a distracted, contentious people.
It is the great inspector, with a myriad eyes, who never sleeps, and whose daily reports are submitted, not to a functionary or department, but to the whole people.
Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
