Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by James Bryce

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its existence.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know what he thinks he knows.

Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity.

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge.

The national park is the best idea America ever had.

The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

If you have enough room for your books, you don't have enough books.

When you find that a book is poor ... waste no more time upon it.

No government demands so much from the citizens as democracy and none gives back so much.

Life is too short to read inferior books.

It is accepted as an axiom by all Americans that the civil power ought to be not only neutral and impartial as between different forms of faith, but ought to leave these matters entirely on one side, regarding them no more than it regards the artistic or literary pursuits of the citizens.

There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut.

The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than do the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.

California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital.

A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.

The massacres are the result of a policy which, as far as can be ascertained, has been entertained for some considerable time by the gang of unscrupulous adventurers who are now in possession of the Government of the Turkish Empire. They hesitated to put it in practice until they thought the favorable moment had come, and that moment seems to have arrived about the month of April.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

There is in the American Government...a want of unity.... The Sailors, the helmsman, the engineer, do not seem to have one purpose or obey one will so that instead of making steady way the vessel may pursue a devious or zigzag course, and sometimes merely turn round and round in the water.

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.

Communication is the key to education, understanding and peace.

Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.

In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid Nature.

An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward, 'Gentlemen, let there be no mistake. I should make a good president, but a very bad candidate.

Of all the differences between the Old World and the New, this is perhaps the most salient. Half the wars of Europe, half the internal troubles that have vexed European States... have arisen from theological differences or from the rival claims of Church and State. This whole vast chapter of debate and strife has remained virtually unopened in the United States. There is no Established Church. All religious bodies are equal before the law, and unrecognized by the law, except as voluntary associations of private citizens.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Perhaps the most typically American place in America.

Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know the things he thinks he knows.

I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.