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History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

John Buchan

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John Buchan
Age: 64 †
Born: 1875
Born: August 26
Died: 1940
Died: February 11
Barrister
Biographer
Former Governor General Of Canada
Journalist
Military Personnel
Novelist
Poet
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Perth
Scotland
John Buchan
1st Baron Tweedsmuir
Lord Tweedsmuir
History
Condemned
Past
Repeat
Remember
Repeats
Doe
Surrender
Find
Dare
Reformer
Giving
Darkness
Chart
Even
Gives
Hasty
Kind
Small
Reformers

More quotes by John Buchan

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Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
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The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
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Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
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Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.
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Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.
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Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.
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You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
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Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failures of our neighbors but their successes.
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The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.
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In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
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He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.
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I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.
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It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.
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Without humility there can be no humanity.
John Buchan
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The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
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That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
John Buchan
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I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.
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We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
John Buchan
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I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London . And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know.
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It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.
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