Great Throughts Treasury

"Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

""It is destiny" - Phrase of the weak human heart! "It is destiny" - dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"A bad apology is worse than no apology. A good apology is like an antibiotic. A bad apology is like rubbing salt in a wound." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch

"The best apology against false accusers is silence." - John Milton

"Humanitarianism needs no apology... Unless we... feel it toward all men without exception, we shall have lost the chief redeeming force in human history." - Ralph Barton Perry

"Wake the mind and it will be vocation, ear, judge, apology, guard, physician, prophet, heaven unto itself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No sensible person ever made an apology." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I grow old though pleased with my memories the tasks I can no longer complete Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past. I offer no apology only this plea: When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end, please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt That I might keep some child warm. And some old person with no one else to talk to Will hear my whispers and cuddle near." - Nikki Giovanni, fully Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni

"Geordie wrote a letter to Mr. Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax." - Robertson Davies

"An art can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it." - Samuel Butler

"The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day." - Samuel Gompers

"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else." - Thomas Paine

"Faith isn't faith until it's all you're holding on to." - William James

"The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself." - William James

"The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade." - Emma Goldman