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Agreement
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Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Anger
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I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
-Frank Moore Colby, 1926
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Books
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One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Committee
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We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Communication
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Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Company, Companions
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We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Conversation
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Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Curiosity
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Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?
-Frank Moore Colby, The Colby Essays
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Cynicism
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By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Humility
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That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Humor
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Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?
-Frank Moore Colby
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Imitation
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I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Mediocrity
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Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Play/Games
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The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Politics
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If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.
-Frank Moore Colby, 1926
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Questions
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Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Sin
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Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive.
-Frank Moore Colby
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Tolerance
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Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.
-Frank Moore Colby, The Colby Essays, vol. 1, Trials of an Encyclopedist, 1926
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Books by and about Frank Moore Colby