Quotes from Captains and the Kings

Taylor Caldwell ·  816 pages

Rating: (16.2K votes)


“The world is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


“Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


“Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


“When you are young you believe the world is all yours, glorious and exhilarating and fascinating and full of promise and trumpets and drums and marches and new worlds,” said Charles. “We don’t ask ourselves what we are living for then. We know. But we forget, later, or it all seems a foolish dream.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


“money came from human misery and death and despair, as always it does.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings



“Forests, hills, mountains, rivers, and green streams had no protection in the face of rapacity.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


“Profits. Joe, if you want to use just one word”—and Mr. Healey wagged a huge finger at Joseph—“to describe wars and the making of wars, it’s profits. Nothing else. Profits.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings


About the author

Taylor Caldwell
Born place: in Manchester, The United Kingdom
Born date September 7, 1900
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Popular quotes

“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands.”
― Louis L'Amour, quote from The Lonesome Gods


“Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it.”
― Mark Steyn, quote from America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It


“Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning


“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans


“One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action. Only gather the people together on a large scale, and a battle of ten thousand men becomes an innocent action. But precisely how many people must there be to make it so?—that is the question. One man cannot plunder and pillage, but a whole nation can. But precisely how many are needed to make it permissible?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Kingdom of God Is Within You


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