1856 Quotes & Sayings

BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay — Tom Nissley

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. — Sam Kean

Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt's internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices. — Mark Levin

It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination. — Eliphas Levi

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington. — Simon Newcomb

Knowledge is power. Knowledge is what makes information valuable. For knowledge to be useful, it must be acted upon. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1834 - 1902). All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. (Edmund Burke, 1729-1797) A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. (George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950). We must never take our freedom for granted. — Al Zelczer

Occult Medicine is essentially sympathetic. Reciprocal affection, or at least real goodwill, must exist between doctor and patient. Syrups and juleps have very little inherent virtue; they are what they become through the mutual opinion of operator and subject; hence homoeopathic medicine dispenses with them and no serious inconvenience follows. — Eliphas Levi

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. - Karl Marx, speech, 1856 Dreams are not so different from deeds as some may think. All the deeds of men are only dreams at first. And in the end, their deeds dissolve into dreams. - Theodor Herzl, Old New Land, 1902 — Mark Kurlansky

I like a challenge. The fact that these are secret organizations, and also very important organizations that can engage in abuses that are so important to our national security - all that attracts me. — Ronald Kessler

How come liberals never admit that they're liberal? They've now come up with a new word called 'progressive,' which I thought was an insurance company but apparently it's a label. — Marco Rubio

Talking with the mouth of a beast won't ease your pain. — Andrew Davidson

People can be happy while they are going through great pain and adversity. There's no pleasure evident in their external lives yet they are content on the inside. And conversely, tons of people are surrounded by pleasure (fast cars, nice homes, great clothes) but there is no joy within. So choose to be happy. — Robin Sharma

While the principles of our Constitution give just latitude to inquiry, every citizen faithful to it will deem embodied expressions of discontent and open outrages of law and patriotism as dishonorable as they are injurious — Thomas Jefferson

The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback. — Edward Burnett Tylor

In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. — Bill Bryson

The locust continues
to devour the world
Hunger persists
Love lurches on
listing to starboard
like a ship in a bottle
Human longing goes on
Loneliness a curse
Innocence persists
Ignorance persists — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Yes, Phillipe. I want to feel you everywhere before I feel you nowhere. — Ella Frank

A person's bathroom, I believe, is the only three-dimensional expression of their soul. — Paul Rudnick

Grace is undeserved. It makes no sense in the world's economy. In one of His last acts, Jesus forgave the thief hanging on the cross beside Him and told him he would be with Him that day in paradise. It didn't matter to Jesus what motivated this man's confession. Jesus still forgave him. He forgave him knowing he would never study the Bible, never impact the kingdom, and never bring another to Christ. — Wendy Blight

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man — Thomas Carlyle

God will forgive me. It's his job. Heine said this on his deathbed (1856). Hilarious. He must have thought that up years before and counted the seconds to use it. — Heinrich Heine

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! — W.E.B. Du Bois

SOME day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all; gone out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body like unto His own glorious body. I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever. — D.L. Moody

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing. — Philip Roth

Uniqueness Leads To Great Success Some men see things as they are and say 'why?' I dream things that never were, and say, 'why not?' --George Bernard Shaw English Dramatist (1856-1950) — John Paul Carinci

Remember Who it is that has placed you in your present position; perhaps you have no home, perhaps you have experienced a reverse of fortune; no matter what! It is God who has willed it so, therefore look to Him for guidance and protection. - HINTS TO GOVERNESSES, BY ONE OF THEMSELVES, 1856 — Julie Klassen

I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856 — D.L. Moody

In 1856 ... I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell. With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slave States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years ... I therefore voted for James Buchanan as President. — Ulysses S. Grant

When Christianity proscribed the public exercise of the ancient worships, the partisans of the latter were compelled to meet in secret for the celebration of their mysteries. Initiates presided over these assemblies and soon established a kind of orthodoxy among the varieties of persecuted worships, this being facilitated by the aid of magical truth and by the fact that proscription unites wills and forges bonds of brotherhood between men. — Eliphas Levi

Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is the sun: in the subterranean and mineral world, it is the purest and most perfect gold. Hence the search after the Great Work is called the Search for the Absolute, and this work itself is termed the operation of the sun. — Eliphas Levi

No outcome is certain, even when it seems so. Fates can change with the swing of a bat, or the flip of a switch, or the closing of a circuit.
It all came down to how far you dared to go to accomplish what the world thinks can't be done. — Neal Shusterman