Stern Quotes - page 4
The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
Theodore Roosevelt
The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford to show weakness abroad.
Theodore Roosevelt
Hammurabi's Code cannot by any means be regarded as a faltering attempt to frame laws among a young and inexperienced people. Such a masterpiece of legislation could befit only a thriving and well-organized nation, given to agriculture and commerce, long since grown familiar with the security afforded by written deeds drawn up with all the niceties and solemnities which clever jurists could devise, and accustomed to transact no business otherwise. It is inspired throughout by an appreciation of the right and humane sentiments that make it surpass by far the stern old Roman law.
Hammurabi
When office and wealth become the gods of a people, and the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the highway to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies and chicane. When the offices are open to all, merit and stern integrity and the dignity of unsullied honor will attain them only rarely and by accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease to be a reason why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render service. Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available.
Albert Pike
Who is like the wise man? Who knows the solution to a problem? A man's wisdom lights up his face and softens his stern appearance. I say: "Obey the king's orders out of regard for the oath to God. Do not rush to depart from his presence. Do not take a stand for anything bad; for he can do whatever he pleases, because the word of the king is absolute; who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?
Solomon
Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
"I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn't vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.
Ray Bradbury
We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn this iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,-
"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."
James Russell Lowell
Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price, - and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing without its price, - is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state, - do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's in the order of their hedgerows
It's in the way their curtains open and close
It's in the look they give you down their nose
All part of decency's jigsaw I suppose
Sunday church and they look fetching
Saturday night saw him retching over our fence
Bang the wall for me to turn down
I can see them with their stern frown
As they dispense the kind of look that says
they're Perfect.
Andy Partridge
Yet those who govern us as if were infants expect us to be grateful that at least we live in 'a family'; a family, moreover, patterned on the ideal by the example of the Windsors. A beaming gran, a dutiful mum, a stern and disciplined father, and children who are ... well, all analogies based upon family break down somewhere. The analogy between family and society, as it happens, breaks down as soon as it is applied. The 'United Kingdom' is not a family and never was one. (Not even Orwell, with his image of poor relations, rich relations and 'the wrong members in control', could make it stick.) It is is a painfully evolved society, at once highly stratified and uniform and very fluid and diverse, which is the site of a multitude of competing interests.
Christopher Hitchens
The title of poet's a noble thing, worth living and dying for,
Though all the devils on earth and in Hell spit at me their disdain.
It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun
And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men:
But Prometheus, torn by the claws and beaks whose task is never done,
Would be tortured another eternity to go stealing fire again.
Joyce Kilmer
