Top 100 Devised Quotes
#1. Taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#2. Why,' said he, 'does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?
Alexandre Dumas
#3. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.
Edward R. Murrow
#4. Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name for "the union of opposites through the middle path", that most fundamental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.
Carl Jung
#5. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#6. You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.
Frederick The Great
#7. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.
C.S. Lewis
#8. The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.
Douglas McGregor
#9. It has been observed, [that for the federal government] to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised.
Alexander Hamilton
#11. I saw now that love could not be stopped, forgotten, or transferred, no matter what schemes the mind and body devised.
Wendy Higgins
#12. Even with all its positive attributes, capitalism in its imperialistic form is the most treacherous system mankind ever devised. It is driven by a selfishness that has an almost religious underlining to it.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#13. Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination.
Jaroslav Hasek
#14. All the four stages in a man's life are devised by the seers in Hinduism for imposing discipline and self-restraint.
Mahatma Gandhi
#15. A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance?
Bertrand Russell
#16. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai
#17. I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening.
Dorothy Dunnett
#19. Marriage is the legal method devised to end love without pain.
Tom Morrison
#20. Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.
Stanley Kubrick
#21. Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and White waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.
Isabel Wilkerson
#22. We are all equally rich when it comes to the currency of time: 24 hours in a day and not one iota more. It is one of life's most level playing fields, ever devised, from the standpoint of a singular day.
Garry Fitchett
#23. This book argues that the history of federal student loan policies is best understood as a series of messes in which attention became focused on some particular aspect of a larger problem and well-intentioned policies were devised to address each narrowly defined concern.
Joel Best
#24. We'd even devised the Buffy scale of life relationships: you start off wanting Xander, spend your twenties going out with Spike and setttle down with giles.
Jenny Colgan
#25. Millions today want salvation, but on their own terms. They want to come their own way, and so we have hundreds of schemes and plans devised by men to regain paradise.
Billy Graham
#26. It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.
Neil Gaiman
#27. There are different pathways - be it Zen, tantra, karma yoga, or jnana yoga. Different ways have been devised to do the same thing for different types of people according to their temperament.
Frederick Lenz
#28. [T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#29. There was never anything so well devised by men which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted
Thomas Cranmer
#30. In activities other than purely logical thought, our minds function much faster than any computer yet devised.
Daniel Crevier
#31. I can expend my life caught in the allure of a million places devised by man. Or, I can realize that being caught in the majesty of an eternal God is infinitely greater than being caught in a million places that will die a million deaths.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#32. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
William James
#33. I never prayed sincerely and earnestly for anything but it came at some time; no matter at how distant a day, somehow, in some shape, probably the least I would have devised, it came.
Adoniram Judson
#34. Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.
John Henrik Clarke
#35. They devised such useful tools, skills, and techniques as the potter's wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture
Samuel Noah Kramer
#36. money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Yuval Noah Harari
#37. I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention ... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]
Thurgood Marshall
#38. We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.
Aleksandar Hemon
#39. One can't help but marvel at the variety of ways that women had devised to make us look like flaming idiots.
Lisa Kleypas
#40. We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catch-words, devised to flatter rather than instruct.
James A. Garfield
#41. Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.
Wallace B. Smith
#42. Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
Virginia Woolf
#43. I never was deeply interested in any object; I never prayed sincerely and earnestly for anything, but it came at some time - no matter how distant, in some way, in some shape, probably the last I should have devised, it came. And yet, I have always had so little faith. God forgive me.
Adoniram Judson
#44. Hezekiah Pendergast," Constance continued, "was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius - and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own 'medicine': Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.
Douglas Preston
#45. The "gravity train" was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century.
Stephen Baxter
#46. Abstinence-only education - the best STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and pregnancy delivery system that politicians have ever devised.
Rachel Maddow
#47. The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.
John Mellencamp
#49. It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!
Francis Bacon
#50. A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.
Mark Dever
#51. The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
Marquis De Sade
#52. An honourable agreement among men as to their conduct toward women, and it was devised by women.
Don Herold
#53. This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.
Terry Pratchett
#54. No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
Calvin Coolidge
#55. Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
James Joyce
#56. A man who works evil against another works it really against himself, and bad advice is worst for the one who devised it
Hesiod
#57. Seriously. A man categorically devised the high heal and he did it in an attempt to make it easier for you dudes to rugby tackle us womenfolk to the ground and haul us back to your beds.
Jodi Ellen Malpas
#58. No form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#59. The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised - a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps it's improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
Robert Higgs
#60. Work is the best wonder drug ever devised by God. Work is as necessary to man as eating and sleeping. Pleasure derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.
Richard L. Evans
#61. Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning.
Ken Wilber
#62. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.
Timothy Snyder
#63. And as we know now, and as I pointed out many times, the great plume of fire at the bottom of the Space Shuttle is actually dollar bills burning, and the most efficient method of destroying American dollar bills as has ever been devised by man.
Dana Rohrabacher
#64. No polity can be devised which shall perpetuate freedom among a people that are dead to honor and integrity. Liberty and virtue are twin sisters, and the best fabric in the world ...
James Henley Thornwell
#65. For Satan's deceptions to be successful, they must be so cunningly devised that his real purpose is concealed by wiles.
Billy Graham
#66. Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program).
Jon Ronson
#67. Sometimes Winston imagined he had devised a policy when all he had done was coin a phrase.
Ken Follett
#68. Christians, above all people, should desire that their elected representatives submit to the Constitution, because it is constitutional government that has done more to protect Christian liberty than any governing document ever devised by man.
Chuck Baldwin
#69. I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
#70. The mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.
Edward Clodd
#71. The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.
Mark Millar
#72. Not only is this not love; I think it is the most diabolical unfairness that was ever taught or devised.
Ruth Hurmence Green
#73. A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
Jonathan Kozol
#74. (Sebastian, for all his moodiness, at times devised some piece of ghoulish fun, as when in a crowded tramcar he had the ticket-collector transmit to a girl in the far end of the car a scribbled message which really ran thus: I am only a poor ticket-collector, but I love you);
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. In my opinion, the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised
George S. Patton
#76. He was either stout or portly, wealthy enough that a vocabulary had been devised to conceal his girth.
Renee Patrick
#77. Theologies of glory ascend to heaven with humanly devised methods for bringing Christ down or for descending into the depths to make him living and real to us, but a theology of the cross receives him in the humble and weak form of those creaturely means that he has ordained.3
Michael S. Horton
#78. We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. Thank you so much, Malcolm Turnbull.
Tony Abbott
#79. I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
Terry Pratchett
#80. Golf is the most useless outdoor game ever devised to waste the time and try the spirit of man.
Westbrook Pegler
#81. In the Democratic primary in 2008, the Obama team devised a strategy to use the caucuses and a complicated system of awarding delegates in the state primaries to sneak up on Hillary Clinton and establish a lead Obama never surrendered.
John Podhoretz
#82. While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.
Dawoud Bey
#83. Really exotic methods of propulsion ... will have to be devised to get there. How it will be done, I do not know. Whether it will be done, I am not quite certain. But I would bet it can be done.
Edward Teller
#84. Give to it the place in our institutions of learning now occupied by scholastic theology and physiology, and it will 142 eradicate sickness and sin in less time than the old systems, devised for subduing them, have required for self-establishment and propagation.
Mary Baker Eddy
#85. Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.
Mark Pagel
#86. More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
Benjamin Disraeli
#87. If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.
Isaac Newton
#88. Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
Walt Disney Company
#89. I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride - humility in the weight of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this home of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised.
Douglas MacArthur
#90. People are so tired. The world is set up to exhaust you and drain you. That's how humankind has devised their world. Life is not necessarily that way
Frederick Lenz
#91. The Sicilian tyrants never devised a greater punishment than envy.
Juvenal
#92. All physical and economic tests that may be devised are worthless if the immigrant, through racial or other inherently antipathetic conditions, cannot be more or less readily assimilated ...
Boies Penrose
#93. It is because gold is rare that gilding has been invented, which, without having its solidity, has all its brilliancy. Thus, to replace the kindness we lack, we have devised politeness which has all its appearance.
Francis De Gaston, Chevalier De Levis
#94. I looked for certain attributes in a soldier. I know the modern method is to put the attributes into a computer and see what comes out. But as far as I am concerned, the computer is the worst damn instrument devised by man to screw up man-management.
Christopher Vokes
#95. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
W.G. Sebald
#96. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#97. Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. No teaching that is not based on reason can be tolerated by critical minds, but the belief that an accident of blind force produces this highly organized world is far more fantastic than the theory that a Super Intelligence devised its ordered evolution.
Alice Hegan Rice
#99. The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
Philip Pullman
#100. Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.
Tycho Brahe
