Quotes from Nicholas Murray Butler

Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

Time was invented by the Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

A degenerate nobleman, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

To swallow gudgeons ere they're catch'd And count their chickens ere they're hatch'd.

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

This was the penn'worth of his thought.

There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.

What society needs is broad men sharpened to a point.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

The fifth freedom, the Freedom of Individual Enterprise, is the keystone of the arch on which the other Four Freedoms rest. This is what freedom means.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

Many people's tombstones should read, "Died at 30. Buried at 60."

Necessity does the work of courage.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed businesses planned for profit are apt to fail.