Mischief Quotes - page 2

For stories teach us, that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need. (John Milton)
The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.
Voltaire
Oh, Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!
Isaac Newton
The next thing is by gentle degrees to accustom children to those things they are too much afraid of. But here great caution is to be used, that you do not make too much haste, nor attempt this cure too early, for fear lest you increase the mischief instead of remedying it.
John Locke
I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
Anne Enright
Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.
Holly Black
A Code of Honor: Never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she's really attractive.
Bruce Jay Friedman
You know, God, the power that makes life, whatever it is, had just to make two things, masculine and feminine, for all this mischief. And made them so there is this entirely different point of view about love and sex.
Beatrice Wood
Anytime a large, emergency spending bill makes its way through Congress, the potential for mischief is great.
Chris Chocola
I hope to live long and be happy. But I'd like to be remembered as somebody who did good rather than mischief.
Mary Archer
Yeah, I've always been accused of having a sense of mischief and I'm very flattered that you say you can see it in the roles I play, because I think that's important, even if I do play intense characters, like especially Christine Cagney. (Sharon Gless)
I think a certain amount of anger has been a fuel of mine, if you want - but also some sort of sadness, and plain mischief, of course.
Siouxsie Sioux
In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson
Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.
James Madison
It is necessary, therefore, to watch, not the political opponents of the administration, but the administration itself, and to see that it keeps within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws of the land. The executive of the Union has immense power to do mischief if he sees fit to exercise that power. He may prostrate the country. Indeed this country has been already prostrated. It has already fallen from pure republicanism to a monarchy in spirit if not in name.
William Henry Harrison
When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart.
Robert A. Heinlein
It will always happen when a thing is originally wrong that amendments do not make it right, and it oftens happens that they do as much mischief one way as good the other...
Thomas Paine
Whence it is evident that the remedy must be adapted to the particular cause of the mischief; consequently, the cause must be ascertained, before the remedy is devised.
Jean-Baptiste Say
flimsy, desultory readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all-are not these as foolish, unhealthy eaters, who mistake their superficial false desire after spiceries and confectioneries for their real appetite, of which even they are not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter, after solid nutritive food?
Thomas Carlyle
I must painfully record my opinion that grave injury has been done to religion in many minds - not in instructed minds, but in those which are ill-instructed or partially instructed, which have a large claim on our consideration - in consequence of steps which have, unhappily, been taken. Great mischief has been done in many minds through the resistance offered to the man elected by the constituency of Northampton, which a portion of the community believe to be unjust. When they see the profession of religion and the interests of religion ostensibly associated with what they are deeply convinced is injustice, they are led to questions about religion itself, which they see to be associated with injustice. Unbelief attracts a sympathy which it would not otherwise enjoy; and the upshot is to impair those convictions and that religious faith, the loss of which I believe to be the most inexpressible calamity which can fall either upon a man or upon a nation.
William Ewart Gladstone
For my own part I am deeply convinced that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste-for that is a comparatively trifling matter-but a great political and a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of the mischief which arise from financial prodigality, that they creep onwards with a noiseless and surreptitious step; that they are unseen and unfelt until they have reached a magnitude absolutely overwhelming, and then at length, we see them, as perhaps they now exist in the case of one at least among the great European nations, so fearful and menacing in their aspect that they seem to threaten the very foundations of national existence. (William Ewart Gladstone)
'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.
Alexander Pope
Is Germany prepared not only to evacuate Belgium, not only to make full reparation for the colossal mischief and damage which have accompanied her devastating occupation of the country, and her practical enslavement, so far as she can carry it out, of large portions of the population...but to restore to Belgium not the pretence of liberty, but complete and unfettered and absolute independence?
H. H. Asquith
I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.
James Anthony Froude
A young plant should always be protected against goats and cows and the mischief of little urchins, by means of a fence. But when it becomes a big tree, a flock of goats or a herd of cows can freely find shelter under its spreading boughs and fill their stomachs with their leaves. So when your faith is yet in its infancy, you should protect it from the evil influences of bad company. But when you grow strong in faith, no worldliness or evil inclination will dare approach your holy presence; and many who are wicked will become godly through their holy contact with you.
Ramakrishna