Preferment Quotes & Sayings

I rejoice in what I have, and don't fret for what I haven't, — Leo Tolstoy

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment. — Ambrose Bierce

In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. — James T. Farrell

Eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve. — John Adams

Preferment goes by letter and affection, And not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to th's first. — William Shakespeare

Those who claim the right to that arrogance without accomplishments to back it up deserve to be exposed. — Jeff Ashton

Why, there's no remedy; 'tis the curse of service, Preferment goes by letter and affection, And not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to the first. Now, sir, be judge yourself Whether I in any just term am affin'd To love the Moor. — William Shakespeare

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. — Thomas Merton

Unnumbered suppliants crowd Preferment's gate
Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great;
Delusive Fortune hears th' incessant call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall. — Samuel Johnson

Plants live; how much they feel and enjoy, who shall say? — Antoinette Brown Blackwell

I don't want anything from you but the fact of you. — Joyce Carol Oates

The prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center , but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"
minus the civilization. — Sinclair Lewis

It is my happy privilege to be able to stand here and tell you that if you elect me you will have elected a governor who has made no promises of preferment to any man or group. — Charles Edison

The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age. — Edward Gibbon

One may not go and find love, it must be embraced. — T.F. Hodge

For a single woman, preparing for company means wiping the lipstick off the milk carton. — Elayne Boosler

The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no ... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart ... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth - then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. — Walt Whitman

There's no remedy; 'tis the curse of service, Preferment goes by letter and affection, And not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to the first. Now, sir, be judge yourself Whether I in any just term — William Shakespeare

Like other men, I have sought honours and preferment, and often have obtained them beyond my wishes or hopes. Yet never have I found in them that content which I had figured beforehand in my mind. A strong reason, if we well consider it, why we should disencumber ourselves of vain desires. — Francesco Guicciardini

Prelate, n. A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and a fat preferment. One of Heaven's aristocracy. A gentleman of God. — Ambrose

No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs — Max Delbruck

When the course of events shall have removed you to distant scenes of action where laurels not nurtured with the blood of my country may be gathered, I shall urge sincere prayers for your obtaining every honor and preferment which may gladden the heart of a soldier. — Thomas Jefferson

Do not speak glibly of virtue. Nothing shall change-nothing-so long as each individual awaits preferment rather than embodying beneficence in himself; so long as we wait upon the edicts of a government ruled by invested and interested men looking to their private purses; so long as we idle in expectation that all shall be healed, and that we shall somehow be stopped in our career of plunder by an eighteen-hundred-year-old mummy, scarred with the wounds of torture, falling out of the sky or stumbling out of the desert, eyes filled with the tears that we should weep ourselves. — M T Anderson

'Tis dangerous to think - For who by thinking tempts his jealous Fate, Is straight arraign'd as Traytor to the State, And none that come within the Verge of Sense, Have to Preferment now the least Pretence ... — John Wilmot

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner. — Isaac D'Israeli