Browsing Topic Best Great Men Quotes

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.

Great crises produce great men, and great deeds of courage.

An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men.

A great man is one who can have power and not abuse it.

For great men, religion is a way of making friends; small people make religion a fighting tool.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became geniuses (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

The monument of a great man is not of granite or marble or bronze. It consists of his goodness, his deeds, his love and his compassion.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

Truth is not only a man’s ornament but his instrument; it is the great man’s glory, and the poor man’s stock: a man’s truth is his livelihood, his recommendation, his letters of credit.

It takes a great man to make a great listener

It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of the world are managed. We assemble parliaments and councils to have the benefit of collected wisdom, but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices and private interests: for regulating commerce an assembly of great men is the greatest fool on earth

A great man, tender of heart, strong of nerve, boundless patience and broadest sympathy, with no motive apart from his country.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt…None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word…Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

Although some people felt Adolf Hitler was bad, he was a great man and a real conqueror whose name would never be forgotten.

One of the greatest of a great man’s qualities is success; ‘t is the result of all the others; ‘t is a latent power in him which compels the favor of the gods, and subjugates fortune.

Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn’t need if you had stayed single.

Great men are almost always bad men.

All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.

It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity.

By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he’s too old to go anywhere.

Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.

I believe this is a mistake a great many of us are making; we are trying to do God’s work with the grace God gave us ten years ago. We say, if it is necessary, we will go on with the same grace. Now, what we want is a fresh supply, a fresh anointing and fresh power, and if we seek it, and seek it with all our hearts, we will obtain it.

Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to live in.

God had no children too weak, but a great many too strong to make use of.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.