Own Quotes

People deserve the right to make their own choices.

All happy families are alike;

each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Change doesn’t happen from the top down;

it happens from the bottom up.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Be thine own palace,

or the world's thy jail

John Donne

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes

liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.

Destroy this spirit and you have planted

the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

The great illusion is that we are what we own.

You’re gonna die,

clown!

Mankind,

when left to themselves,

are unfit for their own government.

It is not my nature,

when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles

the oppression of tyranny to make

their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens;

but rather would I do all in my power to raise

the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

We, of this Congress and this administration,

will be remembered in spite of ourselves.

No personal significance, or insignificance,

can spare one or another of us.

The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down

in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Reading, after a certain age,

diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits.

Any man who reads too much

and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Few are those who see with their own eyes

and feel with their own hearts.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!

His real life is led in his head,

and is known to none but himself.

Ideally a book would have no order to it,

and the reader would have to discover his own.

If we desire to avoid insult,

we must be able to repel it;

if we desire to secure peace,

one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity,

it must be known,

that we are at all times ready for War.

Over grown military establishments are

under any form of government inauspicious to liberty,

and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

You own everything that happened to you.

Tell your stories.

If people wanted you to write warmly about them,

they should have behaved better.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration

that if at the end...

I have lost every other friend on earth,

I shall at least have one friend left,

and that friend shall be down inside of me.

It’s not whether you get knocked down,

it’s whether you get up.