Top Ten Tuesday : Favorite Book Quotes

I keep a commonplace journal in which I record quotes from books/documents I read. Lately, I have not been faithful about keeping up. Nonetheless, I revisited it to pull out some quotes from the way past. It's very random...

1. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. ~ [Declaration of Independence]

2. The Constitution is not an instrument for government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. ~ Patrick Henry [Patriot's Handbook]

3. To be great is to be misunderstood. - Emerson 

4. No author...can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. - Nathaniel Hawthorne [Land of Hope]

5. Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever. - Cicero [Live Not by Lies]

6. One cannot easily forget to love freedom. - Frederick Douglass [My Bondage and My Freedom]

7. To surrender is to yield their liberty without struggle; that were unworthy of brave men. [Boys of '76]

8. And women are as brave-hearted as their husbands. "John, don't get shot in the back!" shouts a wife to her husband, as he starts out with his rifle. [Boys of '76]

9. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. - Winston Churchill [Don't remember the book I copied this from...]

10. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. - Frederick Douglass [My Bondage and My Freedom]

* * *