#promises

Promises that you make to yourself are often like the Japanese plum tree - they bear no fruit. ↗

— Francis Marion

#fruit #japanese #like #make #often

The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it. ↗

— Johann Most

#christians #disease #god #heal #improve

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward. ↗

— Colin Powell

#compromise #compromises #consensus #constitution #country

President Obama is the kind of politician who puts promises on the record, and then calls that the record. But we are four years into this presidency.The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy as we are living it. ↗

— Paul Ryan

#barack obama #calls #economy #four #inherited

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read. ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#get #good #i #kinds #knew

The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises. ↗

— Irwin Shaw

#citizen #compromises #everybody #family #his

How is it that, once victory took form and the horrible spectacle of the extermination camps was revealed, we could have shamelessly broken the promises given to the peoples in those years of ordeal? ↗

— Rene Cassin

#camps #could #extermination #form #given

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#fail #international #life #national life #noted

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept? ↗

— Bernhard Schlink

#sadness #beauty

When you find nothing, Morris said, it means you're eliminating what surrounds the something. Is that a Zen thing? Eve questioned. If not, it should be. ↗

— J.D. Robb

#death