Cool Quotes - F

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

In your code, never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man -- and I will show you a failure.

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure -- which is: Try to please everybody.

The doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

[After an appendectomy and a devastating electoral loss, Churchill found himself] without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.

Experience, n. A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.

The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

[Tests] are not unfair. Life is unfair and tests measure the results.

Those of little faith are of little hatred.

"Do you cheat on your wife?" asked the psychiatrist.

"Who else?" answered the patient.

"Before we get married," said the young woman to her fiance, "I want to confess some affairs that I've had in the past."

"But you told me all about those a few weeks ago," her young man replied.

"Yes, darling," she explained, "but that was a few weeks ago."

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

Now when I bore people at a party, they think it's their fault.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Fame may last a minute, but infamy lasts a lifetime.

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Recluse fanatics have few ideas or sentiments to communicate . . .

Goose pimples rose all over me, my hair stood on end, my eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for this greatest of all conquerors of human misery and shame, and my breath came in little gasps. If I had not known that the Leader would have scorned such adulation, I might have fallen to my knees in unashamed worship, but instead I drew myself to attention, raised my arm in the eternal salute of the ancient Roman Legions and repeated the holy words, "Heil Hitler!"

Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity.

[Fanaticism] obliterates the feelings of humanity.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

And by my grave you'd pray to have me back
So I could see how well you look in black.

When asked why he did not become a father, Thales answered, "Because I am fond of children."

No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair.

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.

Be to her virtues very kind. Be to her faults a little blind.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It will be extremely costly.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

[It] was fear that was then making you a good citizen, which is never a lasting teacher of duty.

[The] sentiment of fear is nearly allied to that of hatred.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off.

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools --
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.

Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.

[Flattery] adheres to power, and envy to superior merit.

The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when had the opportunity.

. . . nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes even better with capers not in it.

I am an epicure; you are a gourmand; he has both feet in the trough.

The best number for a dinner party is two -- myself and a damn good head waiter.

I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority for any town?

'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Who loves not wine, women, and song
Remains a fool his whole life long.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Wise men store up knowledge,
but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.

A fool's lips bring him strife,
and his mouth invites a beating.

A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.

Fortune is fickle and soon asks back what he has given.

I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

The fortune of nations has often depended on accidents . . .

We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech.

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.

The middle class prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day, and not miss them for a century.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by [the United States] in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist." You never heard a real American talk in that manner.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

[The] vain, inconstant, rebellious disposition of the people [of Armorica], was incompatible either with freedom or servitude.

[The] love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.

Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.

If [the fact that people make poor decisions] is reason enough for the government to second-guess their decisions about dangerous activities such as smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles, why on earth should the government let people make their own choices when it comes to such consequential matters as where to live, how much education to get, whom to marry, whether to have children, which job to take, or what religion to practice?

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The thing to remember about freedom is that it's not given, it's taken.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

I am not a warrior, but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.

Freedom is the silence of the law.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change.

The French drink to get loosened up for an event, to celebrate an event, and even to recover from an event.

Of my friends I am the only one I have left.

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

In life it is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.

Don't tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics, and his epistemology.

A friend in need is a friend to be avoided.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

George Bernard Shaw: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend -- if you have one.
Winston Churchill: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second -- if there is one.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

Do not boast about tomorrow,
for you do not know what a day may bring forth.

[The] future belongs to those who show up for it.

A week ago, I had no idea what the future would bring, which, I guess, is always true of everyone all the time.