I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.
Rudyard Kipling

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
Rudyard Kipling

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
Rudyard Kipling

If I were dammed of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, mother o' mine o mother o' mine.
Rudyard Kipling

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
Rudyard Kipling

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son.
Rudyard Kipling

It's clever, but is it Art?
Rudyard Kipling

Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.
Rudyard Kipling

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
Rudyard Kipling

San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling

Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
Rudyard Kipling

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
Rudyard Kipling

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
Rudyard Kipling

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling