Top 100 Ought To Quotes
#1. But killing a man ought to mean something, even if you have to do it.
Joe R. Lansdale
#2. He wanted to write someone and demand a refund on his dark side which clearly ought to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be defective.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#3. I still think we ought to just hire the town and take it with us. Then we'd have a good barkeep and someone to play the pianer.
Larry McMurtry
#4. Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.
Miguel De Cervantes
#5. We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
Havelock Ellis
#6. I didn't want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn't want to do a thing doesn't mean they ought to shirk.
Catherynne M Valente
#7. We ought, so far as it lies within our power, to aspire to immortality, and do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is within us; for even if it is small in quantity, in power and preciousness, it far excels all the rest.
Aristotle.
#8. There should be a parallel between our supplications and our thanksgivings. We ought not to leap in prayer, and limp in praise.
Charles Spurgeon
#9. They want the Olympics. We ought to make sure they don't get the Olympics.
George Nethercutt
#10. To be a baby elephant must be wonderful. Surrounded by a loving family 24 hours a day ... . I think it must be how it ought to be, in a perfect world.
Daphne Sheldrick
#11. They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That's my motto.
Joe R. Lansdale
#12. Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#13. The spirit and tone of your home will have great influence on your children. If it is what it ought to be, it will fasten conviction on their minds, however wicked they may become.
Richard Cecil
#14. Nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else.
Francis Cornford
#15. He that willeth to do shall know what he ought to do. He that doeth the thing he does know will know more. And that more done will open the door yet wider into all the fragrance of a strongly obedient life, and into a clear and clearing understanding of the Lord Jesus Himself.
S.D. Gordon
#16. Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
#17. Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.
Voltaire
#18. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
#19. I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.
Franz Kafka
#20. We have disagreements as to what race does and ought to mean, but we have a remarkable consensus on what it is, without any ability to define it technically.
Barbara Katz Rothman
#21. Look, we ought to do this for our kids ... We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here - they're all our kids - gets a good high school education.
Robert D. Putnam
#22. A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!
Anton Chekhov
#23. A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.
J. Reuben Clark
#25. Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.
G. E. M. Anscombe
#26. War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.
Chief Joseph
#27. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Paul Theroux
#28. A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious ... When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
Alexander Hamilton
#29. One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.
Mohsin Hamid
#30. I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
#31. I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
Agnes Repplier
#32. Most people are not, I have realized, emotionally well-practiced. We tend to misunderstand our fears and misinterpret our desires. We act when we ought to sit still; we feel when we should instead think, and in the end, this allows our emotions to handle us as opposed to us handling them.
Lynn Toler
#33. There is simply something wrong with my conscience. I do try to wrestle with the devil as I ought, but, like Eve, even when tempted by the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, I succumb. Good as they are, how could my parents have bred a daughter like me?
Miriam Brenaman
#34. It is my belief that conscious African American students ought to be in a constant state of rage and in a constant search for ways to channel that rage into freedom struggle.
Pearl Cleage
#36. Devilish men should not be allowed to hold kittens, babies, or bouquets of wildflowers. There ought to be an Act of Parliament.
Tessa Dare
#37. My male colleagues sometimes wonder if I understand as much about defense as I ought to. Of course if I agree with them, they think that I do.
Nancy Kassebaum
#38. Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
Gore Vidal
#40. The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
Miguel De Cervantes
#41. Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do.
Bill Cosby
#42. Before we pray that God would fill us, I believe we ought to pray that He would empty us.
Dwight L. Moody
#43. You ought to pity me 'cause there's always one man to love/ But in the bedroom the size of him's more than enough.
Lady Gaga
#44. It either is or ought to be evident to everyone that business has to prosper before anyone can get any benefit from it.
Theodore Roosevelt
#45. Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#46. It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Nadine Gordimer
#48. Between what human beings so naively and stupidly fear and what they most profoundly ought to fear-i.e. what they so pathogenically and addictively do to their own selves-there is a horrendous gulf and disparity.
Kenny Smith
#49. If we all got what we deserved we'd all be dead. And yet somehow God refrains from smiting us. Whatever you ought to have done then, dying won't undo it now.
Rosamund Hodge
#50. SOCRATES: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him? CRITO: Very true. SOCRATES: Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.
Plato
#51. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look hereafter to have justice administered to ourselves.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
#52. The kingdom of God ought to reshape our vision of what matters and who matters,
Russell D. Moore
#53. We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
Marcus Aurelius
#54. It is undoubtedly the business of ministers very much to consult the inclinations of the people, but they ought to take great care that they do not receive that inclination from the few persons who may happen to approach them.
Edmund Burke
#55. You know what? I think you ought to recruit her for the Section.
Stieg Larsson
#56. Coach Bryant, before you start hugging me, you ought to know that my boys are fixing to get after y'all's ass,
Pat Dye
#57. The spouses of authors ought to really read their better halves books. What is found amidst those pages may enlighten them to knowing a side of their partner that can only be seen on the written page.
Sai Marie Johnson
#58. Where there is a wish to please, one ought to overlook, and one does overlook a great deal.
Jane Austen
#59. Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#60. A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
William Safire
#61. You ain't got but one life. You ought to live it the way you want.
Samuel L. Jackson
#62. It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption.
Carl Jung
#63. An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring ... I ought to know.
Bette Davis
#64. One doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything ... nor ought one to blame others.
Charles Darwin
#66. If diversity is what is a central value in every selective university in the United States, then it ought to be seen as a compelling interest by the Supreme Court.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
#67. Nurse, if she didn't have more money than any person ought to have, you might be tempted to call it senile dementia. As it is, she is in for a rest and a check-up.
Robert A. Heinlein
#68. I can't get excited about a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.
Truman Capote
#69. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.
Jasper Johns
#70. We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.
Pythagoras
#71. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Elizabeth Kostova
#73. A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
Michelangelo
#74. The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.
Charles Caleb Colton
#75. People used to blush when they were ashamed. Now they are ashamed if they blush. Modesty has disappeared and a brazen generation with no fear of God before its eyes mocks at sin. We are so fond of being called tolerant and broadminded that we wink at sin when we ought to weep.
Vance Havner
#76. He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine.
[On Leonardo Da Vinci]
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#77. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than weaker men with breasts.
Jim Butcher
#78. [M]onarchy was, or ought to be, not so much absolute as mitigated by the principle of ius politicum, supporting a mixed polity partaking of elements both royal and political, which is to say, popular and representative.
Patrick Collinson
#79. When you finish a thing you ought to be able to say to yourself: 'There, I am willing to stand for that piece of work. It is not pretty well done; it is done as well as I can do it; done to a complete finish. I will stand for that. I am willing to be judged by it.'
Orison Swett Marden
#80. George theThird Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.
E.C. Bentley
#81. By our ideas on how others 'ought to be' we rob ourselves of the chance to know them for who they already are. - See beyond the limits of your expectations.
Russell Kyle
#82. I do not much believe in education. Each person ought to be his or her own model, however frightful that may be.
Albert Einstein
#83. The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.
Booker T. Washington
#84. In some ways I'm still recovering from the trial. My health is not as good as it ought to be. I've gone back to practicing law and it seems to have taken a toll for whatever reason.
Christopher Darden
#85. We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#86. Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.
Angelina Grimke
#87. Precepts are the rules by which we ought to square our lives. When they are contracted into sentences, they strike the affections; whereas admonition is only blowing of the coal.
Seneca The Younger
#88. What I feel we ought to do at this juncture is to dash off somewhere where it's quiet and there aren't so many housesdancing the 'Blue Danube' and shove some tea into ourselves. And over the pot and muffins I shall have something veryimportant to say to you.
P.G. Wodehouse
#89. The beauty of design ought to be totally incidental to the enterprise itself.
Stephen Metcalf
#90. There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.
Leo Tolstoy
#91. We ought to take outdoor walks, to refresh and raise our spirits by deep breathing in the open air.
Seneca The Younger
#92. For my part, I do not feel that the scheme of future happiness, which ought by rights to be in preparation for me, will be at all interfered with by my not meeting again the man I have in my. mind.
James Payn
#93. Believe not each accusing tongue,
As most weak persons do;
But still believe that story wrong,
Which ought not to be true!
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#94. If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#95. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
E. M. Forster
#96. When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and groveling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.
Walter Savage Landor
#97. I think it's wrong, ladies and gentlemen, for anybody to to be terrorized out of investigating anything. You have the right to read any book. You have the right to hear any speaker and that includes the vile communist that I'd just as soon gas - but you ought to hear him before we gas him.
George Lincoln Rockwell
#98. The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? This question is one which ought to be studied
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. The wife ought to have the first child and the husband the second, then there wouldn't ever be any more.
Flora Thompson
#100. You should never argue with a crazy mind, you ought to know my now.
Billy Joel
