Private Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

He seemed much greater than a private citizen while he still was a private citizen, and by everyone's consent capable of reigning if only he had not reigned.

Of the Emperor Galba

Personally I think that private property has a right to be defended. Our civilisation is built up on property, and can only be defended by private property.

Winston Churchill

Private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Albert Einstein

The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No, the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me.

Charles Dickens

My rule, in which I have always found satisfaction, is, never to turn aside in public affairs through views of private interest; but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me right at the time, leaving the consequences with Providence.

Benjamin Franklin

To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

G. K. Chesterton

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A private should preserve a respectful attitude toward his superiors, and should seldom or never proceed so far as to offer suggestions to his general in the field. If the battle is not being conducted to suit him, it is better for him to resign. By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field.

A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

Men should continue to fight, but they should fight for things worth while, not for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices and private greed draped in the color's of patriotism.

Albert Einstein

It is an old adage that honesty is the best policy-this applies to public as well as private life-to States as well as individuals.

George Washington

Each in the most hidden sack kept the lost jewels of memory, intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses, the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs, other men loved the dawn scratching mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing, praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways: my life had no use on earth.

But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.

William Ralph Inge

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Acceptance of the Catholic position implies a certain willingness to see the present injustices of society continue... Individual salvation implies liberty, which is always extended by Catholic writers to include the right to private property. But in the stage of industrial development which we have now reached, the right to private property means the right to exploit and torture millions of one's fellow creatures. The Socialist would argue, therefore, that one can only defend property if one is more or less indifferent to economic justice.

Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.

Michel de Montaigne

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The genius of any single man can no more equal learning, than a private purse hold way with the exchequer.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Theodor W. Adorno

The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson