276
Only it seems to me a grievous error in a ruler to quarrel with all his subjects at once.
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Attribution
277
Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.
278
Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion.
279
The love of protecting too often degenerates into downright tyranny.
280
it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric
281
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
282
A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.
283
Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable her to assert her own rights.
284
If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.
285
The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.
286
Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.
287
The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.
288
It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.
289
Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point-blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining
290
In judging others a man laboureth in vain; he often erreth, and easily falleth into sin; but in judging and examining himself he always laboureth to good purpose.
291
What right have I to be free, that another man cannot prove himself to possess by nature?
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
292
While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest.
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
293
Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute.
294
You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time
Attribution contested
No contemporaneous record of Lincoln saying this survives. It first appears in recollections published decades after his death, and has also been credited to P. T. Barnum. Even the wording is unstable: this is McClure's 1901 text, which differs from the version usually quoted today. Treat the phrasing as the compiler's, not Lincoln's.
295
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
Eleanor Rooseveltmisattributed·The Invincible Strategy, in The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America, by W. L. Watkinson·1907
Wrongly attributed
Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.
296
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
Epictetusdisputed·The Encheiridion, in A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus (trans. George Long)·1888
Attribution contested
The fifth maxim is the source of the modern slogan it is not what happens to you but how you react to it, which translates nothing Epictetus wrote and has no attested author. The paraphrase stops halfway. Epictetus opens by saying men are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, but he ends here -- taking the blame yourself is only the middle stage, and the finished man blames nobody at all.
297
Then let them eat pastry!
Wrongly attributed
Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said this. Rousseau wrote the anecdote in his Confessions about an unnamed great princess; he had drafted the passage by 1767, when Marie Antoinette was eleven years old and still in Austria. The line was attached to her name decades later. Note the wording: this 1782 translation of the Confessions renders the French brioche as pastry; the familiar English form, let them eat cake, is a later translator's choice.