Quotes About Action

shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now; let me not defer it nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Hamilton saw America's essential nature being forged in the throes of battle, and that made honest action imperative.

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the former. There's far less competition. (Dwight Morrow)

In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than excessive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than vigour, enterprise and expedition.

It was the same act of ventriloquism: the State Department talked, and Tom Lamont moved his lips.

He believed there was a time to think and then a time to act.

He believed there was a time to think and then a time to act. He brooded over problems and quietly matured plans over extended periods. Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith. Unfortunately, once in that state of mind, he was all but deaf to criticism. He was like a projectile that, once launched, could never be stopped, never recalled, never diverted.

in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.

Think of pouring out all that money on a whim.

a general marches at the head of his troops," so should wise politicians "march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to wait the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken ought to produce the event.

At this point, Gates decided to wipe out Biggar's influence forever.

Had the action not been taken, more than half the brokerage houses on Wall Street might have gone belly-up.

He doesn't act on analysis.

I would do what I thought best.

Rockefeller never had a single motive for any action and was surely motivated by more than altruism in championing cheap kerosene.

It's a feeling—I'm going to die anyway, so I might as well risk this virus that I can't see, to speak about the virus of systemic racism that I can.

Don't worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right.

Time to shit or get off the pot.

Reacher said nothing. We can't fight thirty people. To which Reacher's natural response was: Why the hell not?

A brave woman is one who stands up when she hears gunshots. She doesn't dive under the desk.

A person either runs or he fights. It's a binary choice, and I'm a fighter.

Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don't do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.

You need infinite patience. No use fretting or worrying. You just wait. Doing nothing, thinking nothing, burning no energy. Then you burst into action. After an hour, five hours, a day, a week. Waiting is a skill like anything else.

I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.