The Rich arrived in pairs And also in Rolls Royces; They talked of their affairs In loud and strident voices... The Poor arrived in Fords, Whose features they resembled; They laughed to see so many Lords And Ladies all assembled. The People in Between Looked underdone and harassed, And our of place and mean, And Horribly embarrassed.
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There are few people who are not ashamed of their love affairs when the infatuation is over.
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Do not be desirous of having things done quickly. Do not look at small advantages. Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly. Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
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Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
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It is the duty of those serving the people in public place closely to limit public expenditures to the actual needs of the government economically administered, because this bounds the right of the government to extract tribute from the earnings of labor or the property of the citizen, and because public extravagance begets extravagance among the people. We should never be ashamed of the simplicity and prudential economies which are best suited to the operation of a republican form of government and most compatible with the mission of the American people. Those who are selected for a limited time to manage public affairs are still of the people, and may do much by their example to encourage, consistently with the dignity of their official functions, that plain way of life which among their fellow-citizens aids integrity and promotes thrift and prosperity.
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And first Satan's endeavours have ever been, and they cease not yet to instill a belief in the minde of man, There is no God at all. . . . that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours, and is but a Politicall Chymera. . . . Where he succeeds not thus high, he labours to introduce a secondary and deductive Atheisme; that although, men concede there is a God, yet . . . that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existencies therein: That he looks not below the Moon, but hath designed the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferiour deputations. To promote which apprehensions or empuzzell their due conceptions, he casteth in the notions of fate, destiny, fortune, chance and necessity. . . . Whereby extinguishing in mindes the compensation of vertue and vice, the hope and fear of heaven or hell; they comply in their actions unto the drift of his delusions. . . .
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Projectile - n. the final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were resolved by physical contact of the disputants with such arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times would supply - sword, spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by all. Its capital defect ( in Bierce's day ) has been that it requires personal attendance at the point of launch.
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Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.
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Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
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Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.
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It citizenship would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other state whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, andwithout obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of the law for which a white man would be punished it citizenship would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
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Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
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The great men among the ancients understood very well how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make the one the recreation to the other. That indeed which seems most generally to have employed and diverted their spare hours, was agriculture. Gideon among the Jews was taken from threshing, as well as Cincinnatus amongst the Romans from the plough, to command the armies of their countries...and, as I remember, Cyrus thought gardening so little beneath the dignity and grandeur of a throne, that he showed Xenophon a large field of fruit trees all of his own planting . . . Delving, planting, inoculating, or any the like profitable employments would be no less a diversion than any of the idle sports in fashion, if men could be brought to delight in them.
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There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
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Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.
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Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity
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Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find t he right solution, the just solution of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible.
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My experiences of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor be indisposed to serve them: nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
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Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another.
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Anyone may so arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible. He is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
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There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound by shallows and in misery. Julius Caesar
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Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
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Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs
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To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.
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There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
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If you delay till to-morrow what ought to be done to-day, you overcharge the morrow with a burden which belongs not to it. You load the wheels of time, and prevent it from carrying you along smoothly. He who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows out the plan, carries on a thread which will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of his time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all his affairs. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, all things lie huddled together in one chaos, which admits neither of distribution nor review.
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The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which few trustworthy ...
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There was no doubt that we could prevail militarily, but I think that the vice president and secretary of defense and others said that we were going to be treated with euphoria, crowds who would welcome us there, and the problems of administration of Iraq's economic and political affairs was going to be an easy job,
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