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The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.

Agnes Repplier

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Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Moral
Inexperience
Nations
Backing
Strong
Equivalent
Change
Assurance
Without
Goodness
Needs
Pressure
Men
Law
Legislated
Within
Sanguine

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The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
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Books that children read but once are of scant service to them those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
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Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
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Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
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A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
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It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
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It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
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What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
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Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
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History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
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No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
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Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.
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Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
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Whatever has wit enough to keep it sweet defies corruption and outlasts all time but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
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We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
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The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
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