Henry David Thoreau Quotes

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

I haven't been paying attention to politics long enough to have really smart opinions.

Whoever desires to found a nation and give it laws must begin by assuming that all men are bad and always ready to display their evil nature.

Few people think about politics every day. But they are in the market every day.

If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you.

Habit is a good thing for the human race. ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.

I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.

A human being is a naturally political [animal].

Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements

All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.

I'm forever a former president and I understand that, but at this point in my post-presidency, I don't want to be involved with politics.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

Politics is the art of making civilization work.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

I certainly want to be involved in politics and help shape the transition. I am in contact with regime critics who had to leave for the West. One of them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former businessman, who had to endure 10 years in a prison camp.

The most difficult part, when you decide to make running a part of your life style, is the basic initial commitment. Everybody says, 'I don't have the time.' It's up to you to say, 'I do have the time.' For me, beginning to run when I was a student was an ideal situation. However, I've also trained as much as 130 miles per week during periods when I worked a full-time job. It ultimately becomes second nature. It becomes a habit, a routine part of your daily life

All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner andsupper and to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day.

The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take.

It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.

Our second mother, habit, is also a good mother.