If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.
Joseph Kirkland

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
Henry David Thoreau

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
Henry Miller

If then the prosperity of the commercial classes, will most certainly lead to accumulation of capital, and the encouragement of productive industry; these can by no means be so surely obtained as by a fall in the price of corn.
David Ricardo

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.
Clifford Geertz

If they're willing to stand at polls for countless hours in the rain, as many did, then I should surely stand up for them here in the halls of Congress.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones

If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.
Thomas Paine

If we fear the unknown then surely we fear ourselves.
Bryant H. McGill

If you could say of any one individual that the court as an institution is the length and shadow of that individual, surely it would be John Marshall.
William Rehnquist

If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you.
Ramakrishna

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
George Orwell

If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.
Abraham Lincoln

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
Emile M. Cioran

In our tabulation of psychoanalytic results, we have classed those who stopped treatment together with those not improved. This appears to be reasonable; a patient who fails to finish his treatment, and is not improved, is surely a therapeutic failure.
Hans Eysenck

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.
William Barclay

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?
Paul Cezanne

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
Francis Bacon