Action Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Passive resistance seeks to rejoin politics and religion and to test all our actions in the light of ethical principles.

And with the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action but by remaining true to our constitutional ideals and setting an example for the rest of the world.

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

It is the repeated performance of just and temperate actions that produces virtue.

I like to hire people that I've seen in action. I often hire people that were on the opposing side of a deal that I respect.

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel?

Abraham Lincoln

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It's true that government cannot prevent all the downsides of the technological change and global competition that are out there right now, and some of those forces are also some of the things that are helping us grow. And it's also true that some programs in the past, like welfare before it was reformed, were sometimes poorly designed, created disincentives to work. But we've also seen how government action time and again can make an enormous difference in increasing opportunity and bolstering ladders into the middle class. Investments in education, laws establishing collective bargaining, and a minimum wage — these all contributed to rising standards of living for massive numbers of Americans.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

Stephen Hawking

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We can benefit others through our actions by being warm and generous toward them, by being charitable, and by helping those in need.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.

John F. Kennedy

All human actions are equivalent... and... all are on principle doomed to failure.

Jean-Paul Sartre

For number applies itself to men, angels, actions, thoughts; everything that either doth exist, or can be imagined.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.

George Washington

In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

Arthur Schopenhauer

We who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hope is a strange invention—
A patent of the heart—
In unremitting action
Yet never wearing out.

Emily Dickinson

I prefer the talents of action—of war—of the senate—or even of science—to all the speculations of those mere dreamers of another existence.

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.

Albert Einstein