Quotes Worth Framing

Quotes Worth Framing  Gathered by: Carol Ann Wilson

Did you ever hear something and think, “Boy, I wish I’d said that!”? I’ve come across these excellent quotes from minds far greater than mine, and I wanted to keep them all in one place. They deal with individualism and its virtues. They also deal with things have brought societies and governments down. In short, they are words to be heeded and remembered. I believe that all of these quotes are worthy of matting and framing in very expensive frames.


“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

– Theodore Roosevelt, Paris Sorbonne,1910


“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage.”

— Alexander Tyler, writing in 1787 about the fall of the Athenian republic more than 2000 years before


“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead


“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”

–Henry David Thoreau


“All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.”

-Vladimir Lenin, as quoted in Not by Politics Alone


“We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.”

–Hillary Clinton, 1993


“Do we really think that a government-dominated education is going to produce citizens capable of dominating their government, as the education of a truly vigilant self-governing people requires?”

Alan Keyes


Two quotes from the greatest mind in all of humanity:

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

“Things should be explained as simply as possible, but not any simpler.”

Albert Einstein

“I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Thomas Jefferson


“Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

-Mark Twain


“There is no darkness like ignorance.”

Egyptian proverb


“To teach is to learn twice.”

Joseph Joubert 1754-1824


“Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points. Let me warn you to beware of two opposite errors: of letting your imagination soar unballasted by facts, but on the other hand, of shackling it so solidly that it loses all incentive to rise.”

Percival Lowell, Founder, Lowell Observatory


“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

Mark Twain


And from evildoers:

“The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.”

“It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole . . . that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. . . . . This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture . . . . we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man.”

-Adolph Hitler

“Fascist ethics begin … with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.”

Mario Palmieri, The Philosophy of Fascism, 1936

“Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”

–Nikita Khrushchev , February 25, 1956, 20th Congress of the Communist Party