Helen Herron Taft Quotes

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

If you would judge, understand.

You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

Every decision you make in life, not just on the sporting field - a lot of time and energy goes into it. You think things through before you make decisions and you always think the decision you make at the time is going to be the right one.

I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

Thinking is the place where intelligent actions begin. We pause long enough to look more carefully at a situation, to see more of its character, to think about why it's happening, to notice how it's affecting us and others.

Any 6 year old’s hindsight is better than a President’s foresight.

You really don’t know what you don’t know until you’re here. [The White House]

There's a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

We need both information and thinking. Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

I think naturally you want to judge things.

Wisdom sails with wind and time.

Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one's being.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.