Sam Walter Foss Quotes

People seem to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn't seem to be leading anywhere.

One day through the primeval wood A calf walked home as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. . . . . And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

In business or in life, don't follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Everything popular is wrong.

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

We have no precedents to guide us, and that is a glorious thing, for precedents, like other guides are disposed to grow tyrannical and refuse to let us do anything on our own initiative. Life grows wearisome in the countries where precedents and conventionality is rule and nothing can happen unless it has happen before.

The status quo is a powerful force.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

Just because everybody else does something isn't a good enough reason to do anything.

Record companies, they're just like lemmings.

Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

Too bad your inner sheep never forgets to follow.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.