Prove

Famous quotes containing the word prove:

    Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    [T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    We do not prove the existence of the poem.
    It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
    It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
    A little and a little, suddenly,
    By means of a separate sense. It is and it
    Is not and, therefore, is.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)