Leader Quotes

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Lying can never save us from another lie.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the would.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.