“Practice is the best speech and the best propaganda”

October 30, 2026

Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 to 1948) wrote this in a letter to his nephew in 1930, during the Salt March campaign against British colonial rule. He had walked 240 miles to the sea to make salt illegally, and thousands had joined him, but he was writing about the daily work of spinning cotton and living simply, not the march itself.

When does explaining a principle matter more than living it out?

October 16, 2026

Robert Frost 1874–1963

Robert Frost (1874 to 1963) wrote this line in 1914, in a dramatic poem about a Vermont farm wife exhausted by endless labor and the memory of madness in her family. The speaker uses the phrase to describe how she handles overwhelming work: the only way to get past it is to go straight through it, day after day.

When does stepping back from a problem work better than pushing through it?

October 1, 2026

Attributed to Hopi Proverb

This proverb appears in collections of Hopi wisdom, though no original source has been found. The Hopi people of northeastern Arizona have lived in the same region for over a thousand years, farming in a harsh climate that requires communal work: building terraces, managing shared water, and coordinating planting.

When does a task require cooperation, and when does it just require one person working harder?

September 24, 2026

Attributed to John Burroughs 1837–1921

John Burroughs (1837 to 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist who wrote about birds, wildlife and rural life in the Catskill Mountains. No record of this quote exists in his published essays, journals or letters, and the phrasing does not match his plain, observational style.

When should you move without knowing where you will land?

September 16, 2026

Attributed to Hopi Proverb

This line travels almost everywhere under Mother Teresa's name, and it appears in none of her published writing. No earlier speaker has been traced either, so it arrives with no owner: a sentence a great many people have found true without ever knowing who said it first.

Can you judge someone and love them at the same time?

September 9, 2026

Attributed to Mother Teresa 1910–1997

Mother Teresa (1910 to 1997) spent most of her life running homes for the dying, orphanages and clinics in Calcutta, work that won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Though this quote is widely attributed to her, no primary source has been found, and the wording seems to have appeared in quotation collections only after her death.

Can you love someone while judging their actions?

August 5, 2026

Mark Twain 1835 to 1910

Mark Twain (1835 to 1910) set this down in a notebook in October 1904, four months after his wife died and in the middle of the decade he spent as a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, writing against an American public overwhelmingly pleased with empire.

Does the fact that most people agree with you make you more likely to be right, or less?

July 8, 2026

Attributed to Howard Thurman 1899 to 1981

This line is attributed to Howard Thurman (1899 to 1981), the theologian who wrote Jesus and the Disinherited and co-founded the first major interracial congregation in the United States, and it reaches us through a listener who recalled hearing him say it in conversation in the mid 1970s, when Thurman had retired to San Francisco and spent his days counseling younger people who came looking for direction.

Should you choose your work by what the world needs or by what makes you come alive?

July 1, 2026

Attributed to Nelson Mandela 1918 to 2013

This line is attributed to Nelson Mandela (1918 to 2013), though it appears in none of his speeches or writing and is missing from the authorised collection of his quotations that his own foundation assembled from its archive. It began circulating after his death, and it is quoted here as a saying that found his name rather than as something he is known to have said.

Is there such a thing as a loss you learn nothing from?

May 27, 2026

Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962

First Lady and later the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, who led the drafting of a declaration of rights meant to cover every nation, including the ones she opposed.

Should justice protect both sides, or should we look after our own first?

May 7, 2026

Audre Lorde 1934–1992

Was a poet and essayist who opened a 1981 speech called The Uses of Anger with this exact line, then spent the rest of it explaining that anger pointed straight at injustice is a source of energy rather than a loss of control.

Should anger be expressed when facing injustice, or controlled to avoid conflict?

April 29, 2026

Greek Proverb

This line is usually quoted as a Greek proverb, though no original speaker has ever been traced. Its picture comes from the olive and fig groves of the ancient Mediterranean, where a tree took decades to give real shade, so the person who planted it was rarely the person who sat under it.

Should we focus more on immediate rewards or long-term contributions to others?

April 22, 2026

Archbishop Desmond Tutu 1931–2021

Was the Anglican archbishop who chaired South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where victims and the people who had harmed them sat in the same room, and where he kept returning to ubuntu, the idea that a person becomes a person through other people.

Are we shaped more by our individual choices or by our relationships with others?

April 15, 2026

Attributed to Margaret Thatcher 1925–2013

Led Britain for eleven years on a reputation for never yielding, holding that line through the Falklands War and through an IRA bombing campaign that nearly killed her in 1984.

When does talking to an opponent make you stronger, and when does it make you weaker?

April 2, 2026

Nigerian proverb

Nobody knows who said this. It travels as a proverb, and the picture inside it is a chase: the pursuer keeps coming, and somewhere along the way the one running turns around.

Does pressure create courage, or does it only reveal what was already there?

March 18, 2026

Attributed to Zechariah Chafee Jr.

Nobody knows who first said this. Lawyers and judges have used the line since the 1880s to explain where one person's liberty stops, and it has outlived every name that has been attached to it.

How do we balance our rights with our responsibility to other people?

March 11, 2026

Blaise Pascal 1623–1662

Built a working calculating machine at nineteen and spent his last years writing about why people cannot bear to sit still, which is where this line comes from.

Do we grow more from stillness or from motion?

March 5, 2026

Attributed to Rev. Jesse Jackson born 1941

Rev. Jesse Jackson built a career on calling crowds of people to their feet, ran for president twice, and made the line about keeping hope alive part of American speech. This particular sentence circulates everywhere under his name without a speech or a date attached to it.

When you are behind, is running faster the answer or the trap?

February 25, 2026

James Baldwin 1924–1987

James Baldwin wrote this in No Name in the Street in 1972, a book he worked on for years while the friends it was about were killed one after another. He was writing about a whole country avoiding a reckoning, not about individual bad behavior.

Is who you become a consequence you pay, or a cost other people carry for you?

February 19, 2026

Malcolm X 1925–1965

Told Black Americans they were entitled to defend themselves, and he put that in the same sentence as obeying the law and respecting everyone. The whole tension of the quote sits in that one breath.

When facing conflict, should we protect the peace or protect ourselves?

February 11, 2026

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968

Held this position after his own house was bombed with his wife and baby inside, standing on the wrecked porch telling the armed crowd on his lawn to go home.

When someone hurts us, should we answer with revenge or with restraint?

February 4, 2026

Attributed to Aristotle 384–322 BC

Held that courage sits between recklessness and cowardice, and that only a person who has mastered fear is actually free to choose well.

Does fear protect us or does it hold us back?

January 28, 2026

Romans 12:21

This is the closing line of a letter Paul of Tarsus sent to Christians in Rome in the first century, a small and unpopular group in a hostile city, telling them how to treat the neighbours who despised them.

When someone wrongs us, is it better to answer in kind or to answer with good?

January 21, 2026

George Orwell 1903–1950

Wrote this for a preface to Animal Farm about British writers censoring themselves to stay on the right side of opinion. His own publisher left the preface out, and it was not printed until 1972.

Is it more important to protect the peace or to say the true thing?

January 14, 2026

Frank Herbert 1920–1986

Wrote this as a litany his characters recite to steady themselves in Dune, a novel he built out of six years of research into deserts and the people who live in them.

Should fear be something we listen to or something we get past?

January 7, 2026

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Returned to this idea across her whole working life, holding that courage is what lets kindness or honesty actually happen instead of staying an opinion you keep to yourself.

Is courage the foundation of the other virtues, or one of them?

December 31, 2025 Re-air

Attributed to George Washington

This line is attributed to George Washington, who copied out a hundred and ten rules of conduct as a schoolboy and kept them. The saying itself is older than he is and travels in Spanish as a proverb.

How much does the company you keep shape who you are?

November 26, 2025 Re-air

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850–1894

Wrote Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde while chronically ill and often confined to bed, and kept the worst of it out of his letters.

Should we protect other people from our fears, or let them see them?

November 12, 2025 Re-air

Albert Einstein 1879–1955

Wrote this to his friend Jost Winteler in 1901, at twenty-two, unemployed and recently rejected for every academic post he had applied for.

When should we trust authority and when should we question it?

November 5, 2025

Max De Pree 1924–2017

Ran a furniture company for decades and wrote about leadership as a craft rather than a rank, arguing that an organisation, like a person, only becomes something else by giving something up.

Should we change ourselves to reach what we want, or hold on to who we are?

October 15, 2025

Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881

Spent four years in a Siberian prison camp and wrote for the rest of his life about people who keep going through things that offer them no happiness at all.

Can love alone hold a person up?

October 8, 2025

Attributed to Rumi 1207–1273

A Persian poet and teacher whose own life turned on a single unplanned meeting with a wandering mystic, after which he abandoned his settled career and began writing poetry.

Do we need it figured out before we begin, or does clarity come from moving?

October 1, 2025

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Organised his political life around people with the least power in it, and who no scholar has been able to trace saying these exact words.

What actually makes a society good?

September 17, 2025

John Lewis 1940–2020

Was beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and arrested more than forty times before serving thirty-three years in Congress, and he said this so often that it became the thing people quoted back to him.

When is it right to break a rule?

September 10, 2025 Re-air

Epictetus about 50–135 AD

Was born into slavery and taught that the one thing nobody could take from him was what he did with his own mind. This wording is a modern rendering rather than a translation of any single passage.

How much of a hard situation is in your control?

September 3, 2025

Aldous Huxley 1894–1963

Wrote this in the first chapter of Ends and Means in 1937, five years after Brave New World and while most of Europe was busy proving his point.

Does technology move us forward, or just make us faster?

August 27, 2025

Jarvis Funches

Jarvis Funches is a community activist in Chicago who said this on the Teach Different podcast in 2025, years after he sat as a sophomore in the US history class where his teacher, Steve Fouts, was working out the method that became Teach Different.

Do we become ourselves by accepting where we come from or by leaving it behind?

August 20, 2025

Author Unknown

No author has been found for this line, which turns up in coaching talks and locker rooms without a source; what it describes is old enough that almost everyone has their own version of it.

Is it better to try and fail than not to try?

August 13, 2025

Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919

This line is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt (1858 to 1919), and it matches what he argued for after leaving office, when he ran again on a platform of labour rules and public health; no speech or letter containing the sentence has been located.

Should we work on the common good or on our own?

August 6, 2025

Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862

Wrote this in Civil Disobedience in 1849, after a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that funded a war and slavery he wanted no part in.

What do we owe when we see something wrong?

July 30, 2025

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 to 1968) said this in a speech called The Other America in 1967, and in the same breath called riots socially destructive, which is the half that usually gets left off.

What does a society owe people it has not been listening to?

July 23, 2025

Attributed to J. William Fulbright 1905–1995

The Arkansas senator who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and turned it against a war his own party was running; it circulates from his 1966 book The Arrogance of Power but has not been located in the text.

Is criticism a form of loyalty?

July 9, 2025

Attributed to Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790

This line is attributed to Benjamin Franklin (1706 to 1790), whose own almanacs are full of sayings shaped exactly like it, but the sentence has not been found in anything he wrote and turns up only long after his death.

Is preparation what decides the outcome?

July 2, 2025

Booker T. Washington 1856–1915

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia and walked most of five hundred miles to reach Hampton Institute, arriving with fifty cents and sleeping under a boardwalk in Richmond on the way. He wrote this sentence in Up From Slavery in 1901, looking back on that walk rather than on the school he went on to build.

How much should where you started count in how we measure where you got to?

June 25, 2025

Attributed to Ida Tarbell 1857–1944

The reporter whose nineteen-part investigation of Standard Oil helped break up the largest company in the world; no source for the sentence itself has been found.

Does imagination shape the future, or does reality?

June 18, 2025

Attributed to Abraham Lincoln

This line is usually credited to Abraham Lincoln and appears in none of his letters, speeches or recorded conversation, so it travels here without a name, which suits a sentence about not trusting first impressions.

Should we trust our first read on people?

June 11, 2025

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

This line has been printed under at least three names, Dorothy Thomas, Mahatma Gandhi and Ronald Reagan, and none of the three can be tied to it by anything they actually wrote or said. It seems to have entered circulation through mid-century American self-help writing and kept moving.

Is peace something you build, or something you settle for?

June 4, 2025

Japanese Proverb

This saying travels as a Japanese proverb. The picture inside it is a stand of bamboo in a storm, which bends flat to the ground and springs back up, standing next to an oak that holds its ground and splits.

Is it better to adapt or to hold your ground?

May 28, 2025

Attributed to Aristotle 384–322 BCE

This line is attributed to Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE) and sometimes to Plato, and it is really a descendant of the older instruction carved at Delphi, know thyself, which both of them were arguing with rather than inventing.

Where does wisdom start, inside or outside?

May 14, 2025

Andrew Murray 1828–1917

Wrote this in Humility, published in 1895, one of more than two hundred books he produced while working as a minister in South Africa.

Is pride an obstacle or a strength?

May 7, 2025

Author Unknown

No author has been traced for this line, which appears across recovery groups, counselling rooms and self-help writing in almost identical wording, and belongs to all of them and none of them.

Does acceptance bring peace, or just quiet?

April 16, 2025

Muhammad Ali 1942–2016

Said this as part of a longer sentence about why he kept quiet about the charities he funded, which is the part that makes it more than a nice thought.

Does generosity still count if we want something back?

April 9, 2025

Attributed to Lincoln Chafee

This line is attributed to Lincoln Chafee, born in 1953, who served Rhode Island as senator and then governor and changed party twice while doing it; no speech or piece of writing containing the sentence has been located.

Is trust built slowly or decided in a moment?

March 26, 2025

Attributed to Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961

A writer who drove ambulances in one war and reported from three more, and whose books are full of people deciding who to rely on; the sentence itself has not been traced to anything he published.

Should trust be given or earned first?

March 19, 2025

Paulo Coelho born 1947

Wrote this line into The Alchemist, a short novel about a shepherd who leaves home chasing a dream. Publishers turned the book down, and it went on to outsell almost anything else written in its century.

Does wanting something badly enough change what happens?

March 12, 2025

Chinese proverb

No source has been found for this line in anything Bruce Lee wrote, said or filmed, and it does not appear in print until the internet era, where it circulates as his, as a samurai saying and as several other things at once.

Should we stay ready for trouble that may never come?

March 5, 2025

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu, the figure credited with the Tao Te Ching in China around the sixth century BCE; it is one translator’s rendering of a passage rather than a fixed sentence, and other translations read quite differently.

Can you be content and still want more?

February 26, 2025

Thomas Sankara 1949–1987

Led Burkina Faso for four years and turned down foreign food aid and loans he believed came with conditions attached, planting and building instead. He was killed in a coup at thirty-seven.

How do you accept help without handing over control?

February 19, 2025

Author Unknown

No author has been found for this line, which turns up in proverb collections without a country attached to it, and it says something that most people discover the hard way rather than being taught.

Is leading something anyone can learn?

February 12, 2025

Attributed to Henry Ford 1863–1947

Built the moving assembly line and organised a whole industry around people working in step; no source in his own writing or speeches has been located.

Does success come from the team or from the individual?

February 5, 2025

Frederick Douglass 1818–1895

Said this in a speech at Canandaigua, New York in 1857, twenty years after escaping slavery, and went on in the same passage to say that power concedes nothing without a demand.

Is struggle necessary for progress?

January 29, 2025

Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862

Wrote this in the chapter of Walden about walking home in the dark, where getting genuinely lost in familiar woods is what makes a person notice where they actually are.

How does being lost help us understand ourselves?

January 22, 2025

Attributed to Epictetus about 50–135

Was born into slavery in what is now Turkey and taught philosophy in Greece after being freed; it circulates among his fragments without a firm source.

Should we put everything into one hope, or spread it?

January 15, 2025

Attributed to Confucius 551–479 BCE

This line is attributed to Confucius (551 to 479 BCE) and is not found anywhere in his recorded sayings; it appears in English in the twentieth century and stuck to his name because it sounds like the kind of thing he would say.

What does wanting revenge do to us?

January 8, 2025

Attributed to Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960

An anthropologist and novelist who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and died in poverty in an unmarked grave; careful quotation records list the sentence as attributed, with no work behind it.

What happens when we stay quiet about what hurts?

January 1, 2025

Attributed to Confucius 551–479 BCE

A teacher whose sayings were written down by students long after his death; it is not in the Analects and appears in English only in the twentieth century.

Is not stopping always the right choice?

December 25, 2024

Marcus Aurelius 121–180

This is a modern condensation of a passage in the Meditations, the private notebook of Marcus Aurelius (121 to 180), where he tells himself that the soul takes on the colour of whatever it dwells on.

How much of your happiness is inside your control?

December 18, 2024

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Did write, in 1913: that if we could change ourselves the tendencies in the world would change too, and that we need not wait to see what others do.

Does changing yourself change anything else?

December 11, 2024

Attributed to Geronimo, Apache 1829–1909

The Chiricahua Apache leader who fought the loss of his people's land for thirty years and spent his last twenty-three as a prisoner of war, never allowed to return to it.

How do you find out what your life is for?

December 4, 2024

Chief Joseph about 1840–1904

Said this in Washington in 1879, addressing the officials who had taken his people's land, two years after surrendering to save the survivors of a fifteen hundred mile retreat.

Can opening our hearts actually make us safer?

November 27, 2024

Attributed to Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation about 1768–1813

The Shawnee leader who spent his life trying to build a confederacy of nations against the loss of their land and died fighting for it.

Can we live without that fear, and should we?

November 20, 2024

Shawnee Proverb

This comes down as a Shawnee saying. Its claim is that the verdict that finally counts is the one you reach about yourself, which is either the most freeing idea in this library or the most dangerous.

Can you judge yourself honestly?

November 13, 2024

Audre Lorde 1934–1992

Wrote this in Sister Outsider, a book built around the argument that the silences we keep to stay safe are the ones that eventually cost us the most.

Is it always better to face the truth?

November 6, 2024

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

Wrote this in Twilight of the Idols while in constant pain and near-total isolation, and it later became the line Viktor Frankl carried through Auschwitz.

How far can a reason carry you?

October 30, 2024

Attributed to Nelson Mandela 1918–2013

Quoted it rather than coined it. Versions of it run back through Oliver Goldsmith to Confucius, and Mandela's use is why most people meet it in his voice.

When is getting back up courage, and when is it stubbornness?

October 23, 2024

Jane Addams 1860–1935

Grew up wealthy, moved into a run-down house in an immigrant neighbourhood of Chicago at twenty-nine, and stayed there for the next forty-six years.

Do we need difficulty to understand anything?

September 15, 2024

Marie Curie 1867–1934

Spent her career handling materials nobody understood, kept her notebooks in an unshielded room, and died of the radiation she had spent thirty years explaining to everyone else.

Does understanding something always make it less frightening?

August 25, 2024

Attributed to Malcolm X 1925–1965

Taught himself to read properly in prison by copying out a dictionary page by page; no recording or text containing the sentence has been found.

How much does preparation actually decide?

August 11, 2024

Attributed to Stephen Covey 1932–2012

This line is attributed to Stephen Covey (1932 to 2012) and circulates from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989, though the sentence has not been located in the text.

How much of who we become is chosen?

July 13, 2024

Albert Einstein 1879–1955

Wrote this to his friend Jost Winteler in 1901, at twenty-two, unemployed and recently rejected for every academic post he had applied for.

When should we trust authority and when should we question it?

June 9, 2024

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945

Wrote this for a speech he never delivered. He died the day before he was due to give it, and the draft was found on his desk.

How much of what stops us is doubt, and how much is the world?

May 12, 2024

Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969

Commanded an invasion force drawn from a dozen countries whose generals mostly disliked each other, and said his real job was persuasion rather than command.

Is leadership about serving people or steering them?

April 3, 2024

Attributed to Christian Morgenstern 1871–1914

A German poet who spent most of his short adult life moving between sanatoriums looking for air that would let him breathe.

What makes somewhere feel like home?

March 9, 2024

Christian Lous Lange 1869–1938

Said this in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1921, three years after a war in which new machinery had killed people faster than any before it.

Who is in charge, us or the tools?

February 15, 2024

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Said this for years before it became famous, usually as advice to someone who was busy explaining away behaviour they had already seen clearly.

When should you believe what someone shows you, and when should you wait?

February 5, 2024

Attributed to Mark Twain 1835–1910

Spent his last decade writing furiously against American conduct abroad and argued the same distinction at length in those essays; the sentence itself has not been located in his work.

What does loyalty to a country actually mean?

January 18, 2024

Evelyn Beatrice Hall 1868–1956

Wrote this sentence herself in The Friends of Voltaire in 1906, as her own summary of the attitude she saw in Voltaire, who is pictured above and who never wrote it.

Should all speech be protected equally?

December 19, 2023

W. E. B. Du Bois 1868–1963

Was the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate and spent sixty years documenting, in numbers, what repression actually costs a country that practises it.

What does liberty actually cost, and who pays for repression?

December 8, 2023

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Described forgiveness as the most selfish thing she did, on the grounds that the resentment was living in her and not in anyone else.

Should we forgive everybody?

October 24, 2023

Frederick Douglass 1818–1895

Said this in 1857, twenty years after escaping slavery, to an audience that had been told repeatedly that patience would eventually be rewarded.

How do you get something from someone who does not want to give it?

October 5, 2023

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

This line is attributed to Mohandas Gandhi (1869 to 1948), whose whole method depended on people willing to wait, absorb and keep waiting, sometimes for decades, without giving anyone an excuse to answer with force.

When does patience win, and when is it just waiting?

July 30, 2023

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu and follows the Tao Te Ching's repeated argument that the person who does not contend is the one nobody can contend with.

Does respect come from competing or from not needing to?

May 15, 2023

Attributed to Kurt Cobain 1967–1994

Became the most imitated musician of his generation and said repeatedly that he did not want the position.

How do you tell copying from becoming?

April 9, 2023

Attributed to Walter Benjamin 1892–1940

A German critic who wrote about memory as the thing that makes a life readable, and who carried the small Klee painting above with him from city to city as he fled Europe.

How do our memories shape who we think we are?

March 19, 2023

Apache Proverb

This saying is collected as an Apache proverb, which means it comes out of spoken tradition rather than a written source and has no single author; what survives is the picture it makes, noise in the mouth set against power in the hand.

Should we be judged by what we say or by what we do?

February 9, 2023

E. H. Chapin 1814–1880

Was a New York preacher who filled halls speaking about grief, and this sentence of his was already in print in 1895, when Kahlil Gibran, who gets the credit for it today, was twelve years old.

Can suffering make us stronger, or does it mostly leave damage?

January 8, 2023

Attributed to Nelson Mandela 1918–2013

Spent twenty-seven years in prison before he was president of South Africa, and who is shown above in 1960 burning the pass book Black South Africans were forced to carry.

How does the way we respond to failure shape who we are?

December 14, 2022 Re-air

Attributed to George Washington

This line is attributed to George Washington, who copied out a hundred and ten rules of conduct as a schoolboy and kept them. The saying itself is older than he is and travels in Spanish as a proverb.

How much does the company you keep shape who you are?

October 9, 2022

Attributed to Herbert Spencer 1820–1903

An English writer whose book Education, published in 1861, argued that knowledge earns its worth by guiding conduct; the sentence itself has not been found in anything he wrote.

Should education aim at knowing or at doing?

September 25, 2022

James Clear

James Clear, whose book Atomic Habits came out in 2018, built its argument out of his own recovery from a high school baseball injury, which he came back from in very small daily steps rather than one large goal.

What matters more, the goal or the routine that gets you there?

September 11, 2022

Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek, who published Leaders Eat Last in 2014, took the idea from military units where the most senior person eats last, and argues that the people others actually follow are usually not the ones holding the title.

Is leadership something you are given or something you choose?

August 28, 2022 Re-air

Attributed to Winston Churchill

This line is usually credited to Winston Churchill, but it appears nowhere in his speeches, letters or books, and the International Churchill Society lists it among the things he never said; what is left is the advice itself, which does not need an author.

When do we keep going, and when do we change course?

August 14, 2022

Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek, whose talk on why good leaders make people feel safe made him widely read on how teams work, means this as a correction to the idea that a person or a group is supposed to arrive somewhere finished.

Is it better to aim at perfect or at improving?

July 31, 2022

Attributed to Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855

A Danish writer who held that life is lived forward and only understood backward; the sentence sounds like him but has not been found in his books or his journals.

Is life something to solve or something to experience?

July 24, 2022

John Maxwell

John Maxwell, a pastor turned leadership writer whose book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership appeared in 1998, calls this the Law of Buy-In and puts it ahead of strategy in everything he has written since.

Do people follow the leader or the idea?

July 17, 2022

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Took the image from an old spiritual her grandmother’s generation sang, about a rainbow set in the clouds when it looked like the sun would not shine again, and she used it for the rest of her life to describe what one person can be for another.

Can we find happiness by lifting other people?

June 26, 2022

Henry Stanley Haskins

This line is usually credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who died in 1882. It comes from Henry Stanley Haskins, a Wall Street trader who published it anonymously in 1940 in a book called Meditations in Wall Street.

How much of who you are comes from inside you?

May 1, 2022

Ubuntu Proverb

This saying travels as a proverb of ubuntu, the southern African idea carried in the Nguni phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons. No author has ever been traced, and the singular you is a modern English rendering of a thought that older versions, including John Mbiti's, put in the plural.

How much of you was made by other people?

April 24, 2022

William Shakespeare 1564–1616

Around 1600, and part of the joke is that Polonius hands out this advice in the middle of a speech he cannot seem to finish.

How do we balance listening and speaking?

April 17, 2022

Wendell Phillips 1811–1884

Gave up a Boston law practice to spend thirty years speaking against slavery, and this sentence comes from the collected volume of his speeches, lectures and letters.

What does a society owe its people first?

April 3, 2022

Navajo Saying

This is collected as a Navajo saying, which means it comes out of spoken tradition rather than a dated text and carries no single author; what it names is the difference between not knowing something and not wanting to.

How do you help somebody who is not ready to be helped?

March 20, 2022

Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962

Chaired the commission that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was famous for handling herself with a coldness she never turned on anybody else; no source has been located.

How should we treat ourselves compared with other people?

March 13, 2022

Attributed to Booker T. Washington 1856–1915

Booker T. Washington spent thirty-four years building Tuskegee by persuading other people to invest in students who had nothing, and this line has followed his name for a century without ever being traced to anything he wrote or said. It matches the life; the paper trail does not exist.

Does helping someone else up actually lift you, or does it just feel like it should?

March 6, 2022

Elbert Hubbard 1856–1915

Printed this in his magazine The Philistine in November 1901, ran a craft workshop in East Aurora, New York, and died on the Lusitania.

Should we be afraid of making mistakes?

February 27, 2022

African Proverb

This travels as an African proverb with no single people or place attached to it. Its picture is a journey long enough that speed stops being the thing that decides who arrives.

Is it better to go fast alone or far together?

February 20, 2022

William Shakespeare 1564–1616

William Shakespeare gave this line to Hamlet in the middle of the To be or not to be speech, at the point where the prince has talked himself all the way to the edge of an act and then stops. The play spends five acts on a man who knows what he ought to do and keeps not doing it.

When is stopping to think cowardice, and when is it the only thing keeping you sane?

February 13, 2022

Attributed to Ella Fitzgerald 1917–1996

Was orphaned, spent time in a reform school and was sleeping rough when she won an amateur night at the Apollo at seventeen; no recorded source for the sentence has been found.

How much should where we come from shape where we go?

February 6, 2022

Rosa Parks 1913–2005

Had been a trained organiser for twelve years before the bus, and knew when she stayed seated that whatever she did next would be studied by everyone.

How much should other people's watching shape what you do?

January 30, 2022

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu and follows the Tao Te Ching's argument that stillness is a kind of power: the water that yields to everything is what wears the rock away.

What does stillness give you that motion cannot?

January 23, 2022

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968

Wrote this in Strength to Love, arguing it to people who were being attacked and who had every ordinary reason to answer in kind.

Is love always the right answer to hate?

January 16, 2022

Attributed to Helen Keller 1880–1968

Lost her sight and hearing before she was two and went on to write twelve books and campaign for four decades; no source in her published work has been located.

How should we meet a setback?

January 9, 2022

Attributed to Winston Churchill

This line is usually credited to Winston Churchill, but it appears nowhere in his speeches, letters or books, and the International Churchill Society lists it among the things he never said; what is left is the advice itself, which does not need an author.

When do we keep going, and when do we change course?

December 19, 2021

Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005

Was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for a major party’s presidential nomination, and this line reaches us through her friend Donna Brazile, who published it as advice Chisholm had given her.

How do we claim a place when nobody offers us one?

December 5, 2021

Stephen Covey 1932–2012

Made this the second of the seven habits in his 1989 book, and opened the chapter by asking readers to picture their own funeral and what they would want said there, then work backwards to how they would have to live.

Should we decide where we are going before we start?

November 7, 2021

Robert Greenleaf 1904–1990

Spent forty years inside AT&T watching how large organisations actually work, then set the idea out in an essay called The Servant as Leader in 1970 after retiring.

Is leadership service, or something else?

October 31, 2021

Attributed to Aristotle

Aristotle did not write this: it was first put in his mouth in 1989. What he actually wrote, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is that it is the mark of an educated person to look for only as much precision in a subject as that subject allows, which is a different and in some ways sharper idea.

How do we stay open and still believe something?

October 24, 2021

Attributed to Plato about 428–348 BCE

This line is attributed to Plato (about 428 to 348 BCE), though the oldest version of the thought in writing is Roman rather than Greek: the playwright Terence has a character say in 166 BCE that flattery makes friends and truth makes enemies.

Is honesty worth what it costs?

October 17, 2021

Seth Godin

Seth Godin, born in 1960, has published a short post every day for two decades and made this his standing argument: that the gatekeepers who used to decide who got to make things have mostly stopped being able to.

Is it better to wait to be chosen or to choose yourself?

October 10, 2021

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850–1894

Wrote Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde while chronically ill and often confined to bed, and kept the worst of it out of his letters.

Should we protect other people from our fears, or let them see them?

October 3, 2021

Albert Einstein 1879–1955

Said a version of this near the end of his life, recorded at the time as try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value; the wording here is the modern shortening of it.

Should we aim at success or at being of use?

September 26, 2021

Nelson Mandela 1918–2013

Said this in a speech launching an education foundation in 2003, having studied for a law degree by correspondence while imprisoned on Robben Island; he is shown above at about nineteen.

What can education actually change?

September 19, 2021

Seneca

Seneca (about 4 BCE to 65 CE) wrote an entire book about anger for his older brother while serving as adviser to the emperor Nero, and this is its central practical instruction: put time between the feeling and the act.

What should we do with anger in the moment we feel it?

September 16, 2021

Attributed to Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005

Certainly lived it, announcing a run for president in 1972 that nobody in her own party had invited her to make; no source for the sentence itself has been found.

When should we wait our turn, and when should we take it?

September 12, 2021

Attributed to Plato about 428–348 BCE

This line is attributed to Plato (about 428 to 348 BCE), whose Republic is largely an argument about who should be trusted with authority and why; none of the dialogues contains the sentence, and it appears in English only in the modern era.

What does power reveal about a person?

September 5, 2021

Seneca

Seneca (about 4 BCE to 65 CE) wrote this to his friend Lucilius in the thirteenth of his letters, telling him that we are frightened more often than we are hurt, and suffer more in the mind than in fact.

How do we tell an imagined fear from a real one?

August 29, 2021

Yoda

Yoda says this in The Last Jedi, released in 2017, to a former student who has spent decades hiding from one catastrophic mistake, which is the situation that gives the line its weight.

What can failure teach that success cannot?

August 22, 2021

William Shakespeare 1564–1616

Friar Laurence says this to Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) in the 1590s, and he says it a few lines before agreeing to the secret marriage that ends the play the way it ends.

Is it better to decide quickly or carefully?

August 16, 2021

Atisha about 982–1054

Was a Bengali teacher who crossed the Himalayas in his late fifties, at the invitation of a Tibetan king, and spent his last thirteen years rebuilding Buddhist practice in a country he never left again.

Should we measure ourselves by the effort or by the result?

August 15, 2021

Author Unknown

This line is usually printed under Theodore Roosevelt's name and there is no source for it anywhere in his speeches, letters or books. Nobody knows who said it.

How far can self-discipline actually take you?

August 8, 2021

Attributed to Winston Churchill

This is usually credited to Winston Churchill. The International Churchill Society lists it among the lines he never said, alongside the other famous one about success not being final. Nobody has found who did.

Is success about how you handle failure or how you avoid it?

August 5, 2021

Dalai Lama born 1935

Has spent his life in exile from a country he is not permitted to return to, and says the practice he works hardest at is not being angry about it.

Is anger ever useful?

July 29, 2021

Attributed to Malcolm X 1925–1965

Changed his own position publicly and at real cost more than once, and who was killed shortly after the last of those changes.

How do you hold your values without becoming rigid?

July 15, 2021

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Said this often and meant both halves of it. She spent years changing things that could be changed, and the rest of her life describing what to do about the things that could not.

How do you tell what you can change from what you have to carry?

July 8, 2021

Attributed to Albert Einstein 1879–1955

This line is attributed to Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955) and fits what he said elsewhere about a life of work over a life of comfort, but no letter, interview or paper containing it has been found.

Should we build happiness on goals or on people?

June 27, 2021

James Baldwin 1924–1987

Said this in a talk called Notes for a Hypothetical Novel in October 1960, having left the United States for France at twenty-four in order to be able to write about it at all.

Is freedom something we take, or something a society allows?

June 24, 2021

Alice Walker

Alice Walker, born in 1944, wrote this in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens in 1983, the essay collection where she recovered the names of Black women writers who had been left out of the record entirely.

How much of somebody’s power over us is real?

June 20, 2021

Marcus Aurelius 121–180

Wrote this in the private notebook we now call the Meditations, in a working life spent mostly at war on the empire’s northern frontier and never intended for anyone else to read.

How do we answer someone who has wronged us?

June 19, 2021

Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu is the name attached to The Art of War, a Chinese military text from around the fifth century BCE that was written on bamboo strips like the ones above, and whose argument throughout is that the general who has to fight has already been outmanoeuvred.

How do we resolve a conflict without making it worse?

June 10, 2021

The Dalai Lama

The fourteenth Dalai Lama, born in 1935 and living in exile in India since 1959, set this out in The Art of Happiness in 1998, a book built from long conversations with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler.

How much of how we feel is something we can train?

June 6, 2021

Atticus

Atticus is the pen name of a poet who has published several collections since 2017 and appears in public in a mask, on the grounds that anonymity keeps the writing separate from whoever wrote it.

Can inner happiness actually protect us?

June 3, 2021

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu, the figure credited with the Tao Te Ching in China around the sixth century BCE, whose existence as one person is uncertain and whose text reaches English through many different translations, so the wording varies.

Does real leadership come from stepping forward or stepping back?

May 27, 2021

Janis Joplin 1943–1970

Said this in one of her last interviews. She was twenty-seven, at the top of her career, and by every account not enjoying much of it.

How do you plan for tomorrow without losing today?

May 23, 2021

Attributed to Margaret Mead 1901–1978

An anthropologist who spent her twenties living among people whose answers to almost everything differed from her own; no source in her books, papers or lectures has been located.

Should school teach how to think or what to think?

May 20, 2021

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

This line is attributed to Mohandas Gandhi (1869 to 1948), whose method depended on people willing to be the only one doing something, and who several times found himself opposed by the movement he had built.

How do you find the nerve to be the only one?

May 16, 2021

Attributed to Judy Garland 1922–1969

Was put under contract at thirteen and spent a studio career being told what to weigh, what to sing and who to resemble; no recorded source for the sentence itself has been found.

How do we tell copying from becoming?

May 13, 2021

Marcus Aurelius 121–180

The wording here is a modern rendering rather than a direct translation, but the idea is throughout the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (121 to 180), who ran an empire through plague, war and betrayal and wrote his notes to himself about the one thing still in his hands.

What is actually in our control when things go wrong?

May 9, 2021

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

Wrote this in his essay Heroism, published in Essays: First Series in 1841, where the next sentence calls it the state of the soul at war.

How do we know when to trust our own judgment?

May 2, 2021

Rosa Parks 1913–2005

Wrote this in her 1992 memoir, in a longer sentence that begins by saying she had learned over the years that when your mind is made up, that diminishes fear.

Does deciding make us brave, or just less careful?

April 25, 2021

Anne Frank 1929–1945

Wrote this in her diary on 26 March 1944, in the third year of hiding in an Amsterdam attic, and began the sentence with the words how wonderful it is.

What stops people from starting?

April 13, 2021

Salvador Dali

This is usually credited to Marie Curie. It is Salvador Dali's, a painter who built his reputation on technical precision and said it anyway. Curie's own line about fear is elsewhere in this library.

Is chasing perfection an obstacle or the thing that drives you?

April 12, 2021

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

Wrote this in Twilight of the Idols in 1888, in a list of one-line maxims, about a year before a collapse he never recovered from.

Does hardship always make us stronger?

March 31, 2021

Attributed to Indira Gandhi 1917–1984

Led India for most of sixteen years, went to war with Pakistan, suspended the constitution for two of those years and was assassinated by her own guards; no source for the sentence has been located.

Who should open their hand first?

March 24, 2021

Toni Morrison 1931–2019

Wrote about people whose lives were bent by forces that arrived long before they did, and she spent a career insisting those people were still the authors of what they made of it.

How much of who you are did you actually choose?

March 15, 2021

Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Gave up a comfortable legal career, took to spinning his own cloth, and spent the rest of his life inside other people's problems, which is where he said a person actually finds out who they are.

Can helping other people teach you who you are?

March 14, 2021

Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962

This line is attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 to 1962) and has been for eighty years, though the exact wording has never been found in her own writing; it reached print through an account of something she said rather than something she wrote.

Do we decide how much other people’s words affect us?

March 9, 2021

Attributed to Nina Simone 1933–2003

A classically trained pianist refused entry to the conservatory she had prepared for her whole childhood, who later walked away from the American music industry entirely; no recorded source for the sentence has been found.

How do we know when it is time to go?

February 27, 2021

Attributed to Marcus Garvey 1887–1940

The Jamaican organiser who built the largest Black mass movement of his era and started a shipping line to go with it; no speech or piece of writing containing the sentence has been located.

How much does confidence actually decide?

February 21, 2021

Attributed to Malcolm X 1925–1965

Attracted more criticism than almost any public figure of his generation and changed his own positions publicly more than once; no recording or text containing the sentence has been found.

What should we do with criticism?

February 14, 2021

Attributed to Frederick Douglass

The line is not Frederick Douglass’s: it circulated unattributed in the 1970s and was first tied to his name in the 1990s. What he did write, in My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, is that conscience cannot stand much violence, and once thoroughly broken down, who is he that can repair the damage.

Is it ever too late to change somebody’s path?

February 10, 2021

Epictetus about 50–135 AD

Was born into slavery and taught that the one thing nobody could take from him was what he did with his own mind. This wording is a modern rendering rather than a translation of any single passage.

How much of a hard situation is in your control?

February 8, 2021

Attributed to Dr. Seuss 1904–1991

This line is attributed to Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904 to 1991), whose first book was turned down by more than twenty publishers before one took it; the sentence is not in any of his books and reads like a summary of Oh, the Places You’ll Go rather than a line from it.

How much of our future do we actually control?

February 2, 2021

Attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968

This is a paraphrase of a line Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 to 1968) definitely did write, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, where he says we will have to repent not merely for the hateful words of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

What does loyalty ask of us when it costs something?

January 27, 2021

Attributed to Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862

Spent two years at Walden Pond testing what a life needed and by most ordinary measures failed at nearly everything he tried; no source in his books or journals has been located.

How should we think about failure on the way to something?

January 19, 2021

Aristotle 384–322 BC

Argued in the Ethics that happiness is not a mood that arrives but a way of living built out of habit, which means it is something a person practises rather than receives.

How much of your happiness is actually yours to decide?

January 12, 2021

Toni Morrison 1931–2019

Said this at the Barnard College commencement in 1979, while she was still working as an editor bringing other Black writers into print, which is the same argument made with her working life.

What is our freedom for?

December 17, 2020

Attributed to Stephen Covey 1932–2012

This line is attributed to Stephen Covey (1932 to 2012) and matches the sixth of his seven habits, which argues that two people who see a thing differently are more useful than two who agree; the sentence has not been located in the book.

What makes a group strong?

December 8, 2020 Re-air

Attributed to Socrates about 470–399 BCE

Wrote nothing down; it is a compressed version of what Plato has him say at his trial, that he is wiser than other men only because he does not think he knows what he does not know.

How does knowing what we do not know help us?

November 29, 2020

Attributed to Aristotle 384–322 BC

Devoted two books of his Ethics to friendship and split it three ways: friendship for use, for pleasure, and for the person themselves. He held that the last kind takes years and cannot be spread thin.

Is it better to have many friends or a few close ones?

November 24, 2020 Re-air

Peter Drucker

This is usually credited to Abraham Lincoln, who left no trace of it. The thought is twentieth century: Dennis Gabor wrote in 1963 that the future cannot be predicted but can be invented, and the sentence in this form is generally attributed to Peter Drucker.

How much of your future is actually yours to build?

November 12, 2020

Attributed to Lord Chesterfield 1694–1773

Spent thirty years writing letters to his son about how to conduct himself and never intended any of them to be published; the sentence has not been located in them.

Does the future take care of itself if we handle the present?

November 9, 2020

Attributed to Dr. Seuss

This line is attributed to Dr. Seuss and appears in none of his books. It circulates on cards and posters, and some collections credit a writer named Brandi Snyder. Nobody has traced it further than that.

How much does one person's attention actually change?

November 3, 2020

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Published her first book at forty and said she wrote in a rented hotel room, lying on the bed, for hours a day, for decades.

What does patience actually get you?

October 24, 2020

Booker T. Washington 1856–1915

Was born into slavery, walked hundreds of miles to reach a school that would take him, and built Tuskegee out of a shack and a hen house.

How much of who you are came from what happened to you?

October 6, 2020

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu and renders a passage in the Tao Te Ching that says a ruler who wishes to be above people must speak from below them, and who wishes to lead must walk behind.

What does leading actually look like?

September 29, 2020

Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Wrote this in his newspaper Young India in 1931, in the middle of a campaign built entirely on refusing to answer force with force.

What does real forgiveness look like, and what does it take?

September 22, 2020

Michael Jordan born 1963

Was the most gifted player of his era and still lost in the playoffs six years running, until Chicago built a system around him and he won six championships in eight seasons.

What does a team give you that talent alone cannot?

September 15, 2020

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902

Spent fifty years saying things that cost her allies, including arguments that split the movement she helped build, and she kept saying them.

Is honesty always the safe ground?

September 8, 2020

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

Wrote this in his essay Education, and the sentence that follows it is the sharp one: it is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do.

Who has to offer respect first in a classroom?

September 1, 2020

Cheyenne Proverb

This saying comes down as a Cheyenne proverb. Its claim is not that the heart is always right, but that it speaks before anyone else gets a turn, and that learning to hear it is the first education a person gets.

How much should you trust your own gut?

August 25, 2020

Attributed to Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906

Was arrested for voting in 1872, refused to pay the fine for the rest of her life, and died fourteen years before the amendment carrying her name passed; no source for the sentence has been located.

How much independence do we actually want?

August 18, 2020

Attributed to Confucius 551–479 BC

This line is attributed to Confucius (551 to 479 BC), whose recorded teaching returns constantly to the idea that how a person carries themselves in private sets what they are owed in public.

Where does respect actually come from?

August 11, 2020

Chief Joseph about 1840–1904

Said this after leading his people on a fifteen hundred mile flight and then spending the rest of his life making the same short case to officials who kept not acting on it.

Does the truth need few words or the right ones?

July 28, 2020

Audre Lorde 1934–1992

Said this in a paper called The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action in 1977, delivered while she was waiting to learn whether a breast tumour was malignant.

When does staying quiet protect you, and when does it cost you?

July 17, 2020

Attributed to Socrates about 470–399 BCE

Wrote nothing down; it is a compressed version of what Plato has him say at his trial, that he is wiser than other men only because he does not think he knows what he does not know.

How does knowing what we do not know help us?

July 16, 2020

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu and renders a passage in the Tao Te Ching about acting without forcing, where the skilled traveller is the one who leaves no tracks and needs no map.

Is it better to hold a plan or to stay open?

July 13, 2020

Theodore Roethke 1908–1963

Opened one of his last poems with this line. He wrote through repeated breakdowns and made the darkness itself the thing he looked at rather than the thing he looked away from.

Does difficulty show us anything we could not have seen otherwise?

July 13, 2020

Attributed to Hippocrates about 460–370 BC

The Greek physician whose school taught that the body heals itself and that a doctor's first duty is to avoid making things worse.

Is doing nothing ever the right answer?

July 5, 2020

Dr. Seuss 1904–1991

Wrote this into There's a Wocket in My Pocket, a book whose entire premise is that the ordinary house you already live in is full of things you have not looked at properly.

Is ambition about going somewhere new or making the most of where you are?

June 22, 2020

Attributed to Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail in 1846 for refusing a tax that funded a war he opposed, and wrote Civil Disobedience out of it. This particular sentence appears nowhere in that essay, in Walden, or in his journals, though the thought behind it is the argument he spent his life making.

Which rules are you obeying because you agree, and which because it is easier?

June 13, 2020

Attributed to George Washington

This line is attributed to George Washington, who copied out a hundred and ten rules of conduct as a schoolboy and kept them. The saying itself is older than he is and travels in Spanish as a proverb.

How much does the company you keep shape who you are?

May 31, 2020

Attributed to Sophocles about 497–406 BCE

The Athenian playwright whose surviving tragedies are almost entirely about people being tested past what they can carry; the sentence itself appears only in modern quotation collections.

Is hardship necessary for success?

May 25, 2020

Sydney J. Harris 1917–1986

Wrote a daily newspaper column in Chicago for forty years, mostly short pieces that took an assumption everyone held and turned it a few degrees.

Is happiness something we make on the way, or somewhere we get to?

May 19, 2020

Peter Drucker

This is usually credited to Abraham Lincoln, who left no trace of it. The thought is twentieth century: Dennis Gabor wrote in 1963 that the future cannot be predicted but can be invented, and the sentence in this form is generally attributed to Peter Drucker.

How much of your future is actually yours to build?

May 10, 2020

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902

Wrote this in The Solitude of Self, delivered when she was seventy-six, arguing that every person stands finally alone and so must be equipped to stand.

Which comes first, becoming yourself or serving others?

May 3, 2020

Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

This is usually printed under Benjamin Franklin's name and it is not his. Snopes rates the attribution false, the Yale edition of Franklin's papers has nothing like it, and the phrase question authority barely appears in print before the 1970s. Nobody knows who wrote it.

When should we question authority, and when should we go along?

April 14, 2020

Attributed to Harriet Tubman

This line is printed on posters under Harriet Tubman's name, but her biographer Kate Clifford Larson traced it no further back than 2007, more than ninety years after Tubman died. What Tubman did say, recorded by Sarah H. Bradford in 1869, was that she never ran her train off the track and never lost a passenger.

Does a dream need a dreamer, or does it need everybody who came after?

April 6, 2020

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945

Opened his first inaugural address with this in March 1933, speaking to a country where a quarter of the workforce had no job and the banks were closing.

When should we push through fear and when should we listen to it?

March 30, 2020

Attributed to Franz Kafka 1883–1924

Wrote at night in a rented room after a full day at an insurance office and asked in a letter for a cellar he could be shut into; no source for the sentence has been located.

Is time alone how we come to know ourselves?

March 24, 2020

Seneca

Seneca (about 4 BC to 65 AD) wrote this while serving as adviser to the emperor Nero, in a court where kindness was scarce and where he was eventually ordered to take his own life.

How do we notice the chances to be kind that we walk past?

March 17, 2020

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968

Put this in Strength to Love, a book of sermons written partly from a jail cell, addressed to people being asked to love those who were beating them.

Can love resolve every conflict?

March 11, 2020

Maya Angelou 1928–2014

Worked as a cook, a streetcar conductor, a dancer and a journalist before she published anything, and said she only got good at the one thing she could not stop doing.

Do you have to love something to become excellent at it?

March 3, 2020

Attributed to Albert Einstein 1879–1955

This line is attributed to Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955) and appears in none of the authenticated collections of his writing. What is documented is that he built special relativity by imagining himself riding alongside a beam of light, years before he had the mathematics.

Does imagination or knowledge get you further?

February 25, 2020

Attributed to Lao Tzu

This line is attributed to Lao Tzu, the figure credited with the Tao Te Ching in China around the sixth century BCE; it is one translator’s rendering of a passage about not competing, and other translations of the same lines read quite differently.

What does anger give you in a conflict, and what does it take away?

February 18, 2020

Attributed to Diogenes about 412–323 BC

Lived in a large ceramic jar in Athens, owned a cup until he saw a boy drinking from his hands, and then threw the cup away.

Can we be happy with less, or do we need more to feel all right?

February 11, 2020

Attributed to Helen Keller 1880–1968

Learned language at seven through a teacher's hand spelling into her palm, and who never described anything she achieved as done by herself.

Is working together always better?

February 2, 2020

Attributed to Martin Luther 1483–1546

Nailed his objections to a church door and then refused to withdraw them in front of an emperor; no source in his enormous body of writing has been located.

Are we responsible for the things we choose not to say?

January 28, 2020

John Adams 1735–1826

Wrote this to Thomas Jefferson on 2 February 1816, in a long argument between two old rivals about whether people could be trusted with self-government, and his fuller sentence begins I say that.

Why does power need checking, and is there ever a case for none?