O. Henry Quotes

The only real cure for poverty is production.

The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more - to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.

The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.

Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.

Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.

The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.

It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.

Youth will be served, every dog has his day, and mine has been a fine one.

We must walk before we run.

Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale.

Ridicule, which chiefly arises from pride, a selfish passion, is but at best a gross pleasure, too rough an entertainment for those who are highly polished and refined.

No man ever did a designed injury to another, but at the same time he did a greater to himself.

Fold him in his country's stars. Roll the drum and fire the volley! What to him are all our wars, What but death bemocking folly?

The indulgence of revenge tends to make men more savage and cruel.

If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly.

Make Hamilton Bamilton, make Douglas Puglas, make Percy Bercy, and Stanley Tanley and where would be the long-resounding march and energy divine of the roll-call of the peerage?

Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

You cannot fathom your mind.... The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

Talent is some one faculty unusually developed; genius commands all the faculties.

You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown to pieces.

Love people and serve them.

Put your life's plan into determined action and go after what you want with all that's in you.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

I've never quite understood the idea of a "season." Whenever an artistic director says to me, 'I have this slot,' I always start to feel we're parking cars or something.

The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated, because a woman can’t think for herself

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.

It is all a mistake that we cannot be good and manly without being scrupulously and studiously good. There is too much mechanism about our virtue.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

We are religious by nature.

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?