Former Quotes

I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles. (Niccolò Machiavelli)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. View quote
Albert Einstein
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else. View quote
David Brin
In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment. View quote
Pliny the Elder
Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former. View quote
Horace Mann
The difference between a rich man and a poor man is this--the former eats when he pleases, and the latter when he can get it. View quote
Walter Raleigh
A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. View quote
William Wordsworth
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change. View quote
Frank Lloyd Wright
Venerable men you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. View quote
Daniel Webster
Support a compatriot against a native, however the former may blunder or plunder. View quote
Richard Francis Burton
If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America. (Eldridge Cleaver)
Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd The next, in majesty in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go To make a third, she join'd the former two. View quote
John Dryden
Children of the future AgeReading this indignant page,Know that in a former timeLove sweet Love was thought a crime. View quote
William Blake
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance. View quote
Hippocrates
Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old. View quote
Robert Herrick (poet)
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. View quote
Halldór Laxness
Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses. View quote
Isabel Allende
Naturally, business and pleasure can be readily combined, but a certain balance should exist, and the latter should not predominate over the former. View quote
Fredrik Bajer
Some wars have been due to the lust of rulers for power and glory, or to revenge to wipe out the humiliation of a former defeat. View quote
John Boyd Orr
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them. (Asa Gray)
The need for a permanent status resolution approved by Congress is made even more clear to me because of my experience as a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. View quote
Dick Thornburgh
Soon after I returned to private practice, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called me one day. View quote
Fred F. Fielding
The worst manifestations of exhaustion were successfully cured by a long period of rest but it was immediately apparent to me that I had lost once and for all my former capacity for carrying out experimental work until physically tired. View quote
Wilhelm Ostwald
The correct relationship between the higher and lower classes, the appropriate mutual interaction between the two is, as such, the true underlying support on which the improvement of the human species rests. The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs; the former are the thinking and designing [Entwerfende] part, the latter the executive part. View quote
Johann Gottlieb Fichte