Nicholas Murray Butler Quotes

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

The world is divided into three kinds of people: A very small group that makes things happen; a somewhat larger group that watches things happen; and a great multitude that never knows what has happened.

I divide the world into three Classes - The few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.

The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.

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

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

The limited liability corporation is the greatest single invention of modern times.

Those people who think only of themselves, are hopelessly uneducated. They are not educated, no matter how instructed they may be.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty.

The youth of today and the youth of tomorrow will be accorded an almost unequaled opportunity for great accomplishment and for human service.

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.

Cherish yesterday. dream tomorrow, live like crazy today!!

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.

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

To exclude religious teaching altogether from education... is a very dangerous and curious tendency. The result is to give paganism a new importance and influence.

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.

The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty.

Many peoples tombstones should read, 'Died at 30. Buried at 60.'

The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method-more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records-of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

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

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

What society needs is broad men sharpened to a point.

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

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

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.

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

The modern university does not exist to teach alone...It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament...The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation.