Margaret Ayer Barnes Quotes

Resisted temptations become lost opportunities.

Riches make cowards of us.

The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.

All wars are crusades, or we're made to feel they are. That's just what's so wicked about them. We're made to feel - not think - and people can't think when they feel.

Character is the best security.

There's nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you're talking, that is, with the right person.

Curious, isn't it that "talking with the right people" means something so different from "talking with the right person"?

It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble.

The martial spirit is never dead. It sleeps through fortunate generations, but it wakes up very quickly to the toot of a fife. There's that roistering spirit in men which leads them to think a good fight is a lark - until they've been in one. And the impulse to fight for your own incarnation of an ideal.

Sentiment, crystallized, grows into sentimentality. It lost all spontaneity, which was the essence of feeling. It was dated--old-fashioned.

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in - the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

Character comes before scholarship.

All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington.