Action Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.

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.

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

Niccolò Machiavelli

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

Emily Dickinson

Abu Hurayra 'Abdu'r-Rahman ibn Sakhr said that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "Allah does not look at your bodies nor your forms but He looks at your hearts and your actions."

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal.

Thomas Jefferson

Of recent years... representative government all over the world has been threatened with a growing paralysis. Legislative bodies have tended more and more to become wholly inefficient for the purposes of legislation. The prime feature in causing this unhealthy growth has been the discovery by minorities that under the old rules of parliamentary procedure they could put a complete stop to all legislative action... If the minority is as powerful as the majority there is no use of having political contests at all, for there is no use in having a majority.

Theodore Roosevelt

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.

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action.

Florence Nightingale

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring it to light slowly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Represent your figures in such action as may be fitted to express what purpose is in the mind of each; otherwise your art will not be admirable.

Leonardo da Vinci

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.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre

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

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

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.

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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche