Selected consistency quotes

1. Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

2. A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

3. I don't need a great deal of love but I do need a steady supply.

4. True as the needle to the pole, Or as the dial to the sun.

5. Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.

6. I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?

7. Ah, how unjust to Nature and himself Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man!

8. Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

9. The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.

10. The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.

11. As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

12. In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

13. The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

14. Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

15. One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

16. Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.

17. Such as thy words are, such will thy affections be esteemed; and such will thy deeds be as thy affections and such thy life as thy deeds.

18. Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

19. Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

20. You do good work for a long-enough time, I believed, and you'd get noticed.

21. A home opener is always exciting, no matter if it's home or on the road.

22. For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.

23. In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.

24. I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.

25. Think naught a trifle, though it small appear; Small sands the mountain, moments make the year, And trifles life.

26. One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

27. I like my buddies from West Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them when I was middle-age, I liked them before I was president, and I like them during president, and I like them after president.

28. Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway...

29. Is it not excessively ridiculous to seek the good opinion of those whom you would never wish to be like?

30. Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

31. Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.

32. Either do not attempt at all, or go through with it.

33. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

34. The truth is at the beginning of anything and its end are alike touching.

35. The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. That intellectuality is more vigorous that has attained its strength gradually. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation - persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.

36. A small task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.

37. We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

38. Be true to thyself, as thou be not false to others.

39. I only used my whole life one perfume: and it's Cartier's Le Must.

40. If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big.

41. Nobody's wrong but England - and England's always wrong, Too late - or else too early - too soft - or else too strong. And when for once the wide world begins to praise her name Her own sons crowd and hurry to shout her back to shame.

42. And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth.

43. We've been remarkably consistent, haven't lost a game and we have played stylish football. We have entertained people who just love football.

44. Consistency is the quality of the Champions and that's what we want to be. To win like we did today against a team like Leeds shows that we are really up for it and hungry.

45. I'm proud of the fact that I stood up early and unequivocally in opposition to Bush's foreign policy (and was the only U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois to do so). That opposition hasn't changed.

46. John McCain once opposed these tax cuts -- he rightly called them unfair and fiscally irresponsible. But now he has done an about face and wants to make them permanent, just like he wants a permanent occupation in Iraq. No matter what the costs, no matter what the consequences, John McCain seems determined to carry out a third Bush term...

47. I was a little puzzled by the frenzy that I set off by what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement, which is that I am absolutely committed to ending the war. I'm not trying to dump on you guys, but I'm surprised at how finely calibrated every single word was measured. I wasn't saying anything that I hadn't said before, that I didn't say a year ago, or when I was a U.S. senator. If you look at our position, it's been very consistent. The notion that we have to get out carefully has been a consistent position. ... I think what's happened is that the McCain campaign primed the pump with the press to suggest that somehow we were changing our policy when we hadn't and that just hasn't been the case. I've given no indication of a change in policy ... I think John McCain's going to have a much harder time explaining how he is willing to perpetuate a presence in Iraq for 10, 20, 50 years.

48. If he wanted, the Barack Obama of today could have a pretty good debate with the Barack Obama of yesterday. They could argue about whether the death penalty is ever appropriate. Whether it makes sense to ban handguns. They might explore their differences on the Patriot Act or parental notification of abortion.

49. It's wrong that Senator Obama got to go through fifteen debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen.

50. Kansas Senator Brownback [wins] the 'bad timing award' for the week. (BROWNBACK): I think the biggest thing really I've seen of Barack Obama is a willingness, an aggressiveness to talk bipartisan, and yet to vote and be hard left, most liberal member in the United States Senate. (OLBERMANN): Ringing a little tinnily in light of Obama's FISA vote, about which the Left is justifiably ripped over.

51. Bruce was writing five or ten songs a week. He would say, 'I'm gonna go home tonight and write a great song,' and he did. He was the Boss then, and he's the Boss now.

52. How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate; more, that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair.

53. What you have witnessed since Christopher Hitchens's opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq] is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug.

54. Monsieur Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d'heures.

55. I can tell you that I may be a lot of things but I am not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004, I laid it all out there. And you're right, on a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I'm embarrassed by it. I'm very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn't jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth. So I know that it is something that some people have said, 'Wait a minute. What happened here?' But I have talked about this and written about it and then, unfortunately, in a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past.

56. We never expected anything, actually. I think we still don't expect anything. We were proud of the album when we finished it, so whatever success it has we are just like, 'Wow, cool.' It's not going to change the way we work or think. I'm as proud of this record now as I was when we finished it.

57. You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

58. Her music remains reassuringly the same ecstatic alchemy of the humdrum and otherworldly. Recalling the hello-clouds wonder of The Big Sky from 1985's Hounds of Love or the frank paean to menstruation that is Strange Phenomena from her debut, The Kick Inside, Aerial finds Bush marvelling in the magic of the everyday: the wind animating a skirt hanging on a clothes line, the trace of footprints leading into the sea, the indecipherable codes of birdsong.

59. Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)

60. Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.

61. 'It's all one song.' -- Replying to a man in the audience, who said 'It all sounds the same!'

62. As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical. --Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [213]

63. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.

64. Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

65. By directing one good film, you prove that you had a movie inside of you. By directing two, you prove you are a director.

66. 'Pope Huxley' title of an article by R.H. Hutton who complains that whilst THH advocates agnosticism for everyone else, he's apt to be a mite too certain himself!

67. Let your conduct towards men have some uniformity.

68. But don't be bad and play the game/get mad and change/Then you wonda why these muthafuckas/call you names.

69. 'Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals.'

70. There has never been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency.

71. Whoever in his public services is handcuffed and shackled by the vice of consistency will be a man not free to act as various questions come before him from time to time; he will be a statesman locked in a prison house, keys to which are in the keeping of days and events that are dead. Let me quote Emerson: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.'

72. I saw he was now and always would be his own man

73. Two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience's attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one's insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst. The former approach, which Chomsky exemplifies, requires hard work, whereas the latter is a lazy substitute for it. ... The master at this pose of maverick unpredictability used to be Christopher Hitchens. Amidst a fairly typical leftist politics, he would suddenly ambush unsuspecting readers with his opposition to abortion, admiration of the misogynist and juvenile lyrics of Two Live Crew ('I think that's very funny'), or support for Columbus's extermination of Native Americans ('deserving to be celebrated with great vim and gusto'). Immediately the talk of the town became, 'Did you read Hitchens this week?' Although a tacit assumption equates unpredictability with independence of mind, it might just as well signal lack of principle.

74. I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes, And I certainly haven't been spreading myself around I still only travel by foot, and by foot it's a slow climb But I'm good at being uncomfortable, So I can't stop changing all the time

75. Astaire can't do anything bad

76. With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself - not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology - is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, 'You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried.' But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate. What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves. We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender. But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism - or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism - for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton.

77. Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations- he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction. --Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument ('The 'We' Fallacy'), February 1988

78. ...the problem lies in Chomsky's description of Serb atrocities as 'quite real' and 'often ghastly'. 'Quite real ' is a cop-out for very real. Atrocities 'sharply escalated' after Nato's bombardment, he says, but does not explain what these were: mass executions, rape, torture. The index refers to 'atrocities' in Africa, Columbia, East Timor and Turkey without the appearance of 'Serbia'. --Robert Fisk, December 15, 1999 [200]

79. When I purchase an album, I like an album where I don't have to skip any songs. That's the kind of album I tried to make. There's something on there for everyone

80. Sean Hannity flip-flops so fast his head swivels completely around ... self-proclaimed McCain surrogate Sean Hannity of Fox Noise, victim of one of the funniest moments in broadcasting history last night. After the story of North Korea's deal to end its nuclear program, Hannity went on to cheer lead for President Bush and bash his media critics. 'The news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration,' he pleaded. Then he got angry. 'But will the press report it that way?' He then introduced his guest, former unconfirmed UN Ambassador John Bolton, who promptly completely disagreed with him. 'I think it's actually a clear victory for North Korea, demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.' Hannity promptly went from 100 percent for the Korea nuke deal to 100 percent against it. 'Boy, I tell you, they've done it time and time again. I'm sort of perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well, knowing that they haven't kept the agreements in the past.' In addition to his case of perplexity, Mr. Hannity is said to be recovering from third-degree whiplash. Sean Hannity, today's worst person in the world!

81. Actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often.

82. There'll be no oiling up with this band. The oil has been there for years and it only gets better.

83. Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

84. Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

85. Great show as always!

86. 'A wise person decides slowly but abides by these decisions.'

87. He was your friend forever, but if your opponent, an implacable foe. He never changed.

88. The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

89. People say, 'Bill, quit talking about Kennedy, man. It was a long time ago. Just let it go, all right? It's a long time ago, just forget it.' I'm like, 'All right, then don't bring up Jesus to me. As long as we're talking shelf life here :'

90. But always what we have taken in hand, the same we have achieved. (ch. 17)

91. My music, it doesn't matter if I did it 20 years ago or if I did it tomorrow. It doesn't go with trends. My trousers don't get wider and tighter every six months. My music just stays what it is, and that's the way I like it.

92. Only the mediocre are always at their best.

93. Fill it up. I take as large draughts of liquor as I did of love. I hate a flincher in either.

94. Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. 'T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a 'foot' a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. 'T is the same thing in the Chancellor's conscience.

95. A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe.

96. Certes, c'est un subject merveilleusement vain, divers, et ondoyant, que l'homme. Il est malaise d'y fonder jugement constant et uniforme.

97. If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

98. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

99. Never separate the life you live from the words you speak.

100. A 'pacifist male' is a contradiction in terms. Most self-described 'pacifists' are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger.