QUOTATIONS THAT CAUGHT MY FANCY

Home

"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the
sand. I beat people up."
- Muhammed Ali

"I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem."
--Ashleigh Brilliant

The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am but a gatherer, and a disposer of other men's stuff. If the world
like it not, so much the worse for them.
{ Cowper }

Barium: What you do with dead chemists.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the
idea succeeds.--Mark Twain

There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going.

--- Beverly Sills

The dignified don't even enter in the game.
--The Jam

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all
the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, `The underneath
ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.' You would say,
`Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment'; and that is really what
a scientific person would say about the universe."
-Bertrand Russel
(From Why I Am Not a Christian [London: Watts, 1927])


Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and
those who dare not, are slaves.
-George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron]

Never knock on Death's door, just ring the doorbell and run.

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the
young know everything.


Before the development of modern transport and communications,
half the world didn't know how the other half lived. Today, in our
enlightened age, half the world doesn't care.

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not
know what a palladium is, but it is a good thing, no doubt, at any
rate. - Mark Twain

Whenever I feel like exercise I lie down until the feeling passes.
Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977)

Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions,
running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backward, lying
down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.
Unknown Author

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I
never intend to take any. Mark Twain

You know you're into middle age when you realize that caution is the
only thing you care to exercise

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of
sound to a maximum of sense.
--Mark Twain

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the
plague it promised to heal.
--- Daniel Berrigan

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society." - Mark Twain

"Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more
statesmen." -- Bob Edwards, in the Dictionary of Outrageous Quotations

What would you do with a brain if you had one?
    --Judy Garland.

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything
that counts can be counted."

    >>>Albert Einstein

All things are difficult before they are easy.
- Thomas Fuller

Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that
shall make thee break thy word or lose thy
self-respect.

--- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency
in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those
whom they dislike.

--- Alexander Hamilton

He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation
perfectly delightful.
        -- Sydney Smith

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is
merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
-----Bertrand Russell

It is in our hearts that evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it
must be plucked out. --Bertrand Russell

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. --
Bertrand Russel

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid
starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is
voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. --Bertrand Russell

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. --
Bertrand Russell

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever
that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the
majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish
than sensible.
Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929

Social dealings in private life are filled with fear, especially in
Britain. People take pains not to wear their heart on their sleeves for
daws to peck at. As far as they can, they keep their emotions to
themselves. The will behave in exactly the same way to you whether they
like or dislike you, provided they have no motive of self-interest for
making up to you. They are stiff and shy and unspontaneous. They wear an
armour designed to conceal the frightened child within. The result is
that social intercourse becomes boring, that friendships have little
life in them, and that love is only a pale shadow of what it might be.
Bertrand Russell, Life Without Fear New Hopes for a Changing World
(1951)

United with his fellowmen by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a
common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always,
shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a
long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by
weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief
is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or
misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten
their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need, of the sorrows, the
difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.
Bertrand Russell The Free Man's Worship" [1903]


"If it ain't broke; don't fix it"

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash

"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more
intelligently."

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

    The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four
Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your
three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you.
    -Rita Mae Bro

    Ah, but Perl isn't just another insane language, it's the
insane language of choice!
    -Ken Graves

    Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and
safely insane every night of our lives.
    -- William Dement

    This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random
driven, without one glimpse of reason or of heaven.
    --Thomas Moore

    He raves, his words are loose as heaps of sand, and scattered
wide from sense. So high he's mounted on his airy throne, that now
the wind has got into his head, and turns his brains to frenzy.
    --Dryden


"Be not intimidated by a strong woman. For she can plow the fields while
you drink beer."

If your baby is "beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps
on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time," you're the
grandma.
- Theresa Bloomingdale

It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the
result is twins.
- Chinese Proverb

When I was born, I was so surprised I couldn't talk for a year and a
half.
- Gracie Allen

Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a middle name is so
he can tell when he's in trouble.
- Dennis Fakes

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
- Frederick Douglas

Think of stretch marks as pregnancy service stripes.
--Joyce Armor

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?
- Milton Berle

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your
brain.
-Martin Mull

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like
shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
-Phyllis Diller

Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children.
Now I have six children and no theories.
-John Wilmot

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where
they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
- P.J. O'Rourke

I like deadlines. I like the whoosing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

The progress of evolution from President Washington
to President Grant was alone evidence enough to
upset Darwin.
--Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
_The Education of Henry Adams_

Winning isn't everything--it's the only thing.
--Vince Lombardi

I was left in no doubt as to the severity of the hangover when a cat
stamped into the room.
PG Wodehouse

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a
coffin. -- H. L. Mencken

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most
daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell the truth. Mencken, H.L.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. --
H.L. Mencken

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake. --
H.L.Mencken

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is
always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and
wrong.
Henry Louis Mencken, "The Divine Afflatus," New York Evening Mail,
November 15, 1917; Prejudices: Second Series, 1920

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which
is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented. H.L.
Mencken

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children are smart.
H. L. Mencken

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

No one in this world, as far as I know.... has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain
people.
H.L.Mencken , Notes on journalism, Chicago Tribune Sept. 19, 1926

Abandon all hopes of utopia -- there are people involved.
Clayton Cramer

The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense
damnable. -- Lord Chesterfield

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.-- The Duke of
Wellington, when referred to as Irish 

Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and
still your eyes are on the ground. -- Dante Alighieri

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of
moral crisis, preserved their neutrality.-- attributed to Dante

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not
yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the
feminine soul, is ``What does a woman want?'-- Sigmund Freud, Letter
to Marie Bonaparte

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use
whatsoever. -- Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like
an idiot.
Steven Wright

"A little flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere,
or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair.
But no, you send us Congress!
Good God, sir, was that fair?"
- John Adams (1776)

If the person you are talking to doesn't
appear to be listening, be patient.
It may simply be that he has a small
piece of fluff in his ear.
[Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired
[by A. A. Milne

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the
bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win
when the match is even. - Muhammad Ali.

It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid
than to open it and remove all doubt.
- Mark Twain


I ran a mile at full speed into the void, out to where no lights lit
the roadway. When I returned, fear's back was broken.
--Don Kardong, 1976 Olympic marathoner

We cannot reform our forefathers.
    --George Eliot, _Adam Bede_, 1859

Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's
mind.
    W. Somerset Maugham, _Of Human Bondage_

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on
a summer's day, listening to the murmer of water, or watching the clouds
float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

    >>>Sir John Lubbock

"It's good to remember that at any given time some people are not paying
attention, and all other times, no one is."

    >>>Frederick Mosteller


William Gladstone once said, that he had heard many speeches in
parliament, which had deeply influenced his opinion, but not a single
one had made him change his vote.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure
to bother about whether you are happy or not.
The cure for it is occupation.

--- George Bernard Shaw

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also
of the overcoming of it.
--- Helen Adams Keller

You should not wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for
liberty and truth.
-Henrik Ibsen

All men are frauds.
The only difference
between them is that
some admit it.
I myself deny it.

-H. L. Mencken

Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor.
I see the better course and approve it: I follow
the worse.
-Ovid

Se que no duda es fe muerta.
Faith which does not doubt is a dead faith.
-Miguel de Unamuno


The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own
particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with
ours.
-William James

History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they
have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
---Dale Carnegie


It is [the] belief in absolutes, I would hazard,
that is the great enemy today of the life of the mind. This may
seem a rash proposition. The fashion of the time is to denounce
relativism as the root of all evil. But history suggests that the
damage done to humanity by the relativist is far less than the
damage done by the absolutist - by the fellow who, as Mr. Dooley once
put it, "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th'
facts in th' case."

- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.


When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it--
don't back down and don't give up--then you're going to mystify a
lot of folks.
- Bob Dylan

Arthur Dent: You know, it's at times like this,
when I'm stuck in a Volgon air lock with a man from Betelgeuse,
about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what
my mother told me when I was young.
Ford Prefect: Why? What did she tell you?
Arthur: I don't know; I didn't listen.
- Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy"


We can never give up the belief that the good guys
always win. And that we are the good guys.
- Faith Popcorn

When, in the name of God, people hold black-and-white beliefs that
cut them off from other human beings; when, in the name of God, they give
up their own sense of right and wrong; when, inthe name of God, they suffer
financial deprivation; then, they are suffering from religious addiction.
- Father Leo Booth. "When God Becomes a Drug."


The doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client
to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright


A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity
to the point of doubtful sanity.
- Robert Frost

Nobody can live in society without conventions.
The reason why sensible people are as conventional
as they can bear to be is that conventionality
saves so much time and thought and trouble and
social friction of one sort or another that it
leaves them much more leisure time for freedom
than unconventionality does.
-George Bernard Shaw

I'm going to turn on the light,
and we'll be two people in a room
looking at each other and wondering
why on earth we were afraid of the dark.
- Gale Wilhelm

It's never too late to become the person you could
have been.
- George Eliot


Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your
brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in
your own eye? How can you say to your brother,
"Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,"
when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You
hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye,
and then you will see clearly to remove the speck
from your brother's eye.
-----Jesus of Nazareth

Tolerance is the positive
and cordial effort
to understand another's
beliefs, practices, and habits
without necessarily sharing
or accepting them.
- Joshua Liebman
[not a misspelling of "Joe Lieberman"]


In our country are evangelists and
zealots of many different political,
economic and religious persuasions
whose fanatical conviction is that
all thought is divinely classified
into two kinds—that which is
their own and that which is false
and dangerous.
- Justice Robert H. Jackson


There are many people who reach their conclusions
about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the
answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.
-Soren Kierkegaard

Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional.
- M. Kathleen Casey

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic,
but I will say that if you're alive,
you got to flap your arms and legs,
you got to jump around a lot,
you got to make a lot of noise,
because life is the very opposite of death.
And therefore, as I see it,
if you're quiet, you're not living.
You've got to be noisy,
or at least your thoughts should
be noisy and colorful and lively.
- Mel Brooks, Stand-up Philosopher

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved
in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.


Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to
them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do it without any thought of
reward. Your life will never be the same again.
- Og Mandino


Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature
leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-Thomas Henry Huxley


Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the
chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of
which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too. All sorts of things
occur to help one that would never otherwise have
occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the
decision, raising in one's favor all manner of
unforeseen incidents and meetings and material
assistance, which no man could have dreamed would
have come his way. I have learned a deep respect
for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do,
or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it.

---------W. H. Murray, in "The Scottish Himalayan
Expedition"


The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often
cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
--Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
_Sartor Resartus_ [1833-1834]

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the
surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in
morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have
whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical an
tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
- H.L.Mencken

The best things and best people
rise out of their separateness.
I'm against a homogenized society
because I want the cream to rise.
- Robert Frost

Life is uncertain, eat dessert first.
-Ernestine Ulmer

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eating you.
--- Cormac McCarthy
in All the Pretty Horses, 1992, p291

When my time comes, I hope no one drains my veins of their
sustaining fluid and fills them with formaldehyde, then
wastes me by putting me in a concrete box in the ground for
eternity. Rather just a simple pine box with an acorn on top
of it. Find a place where a tree is needed and return me to
nature. When the acorn grows, I can nourish it and give back
to nature in some measure, What I have taken. Maybe some day
kids can crawl on my branches or a raccoon can curl up
on my branches or birds can sing out from my leaves. At any
rate, I'd rather let an oak tree be my epitaph than a marble
slab be my tombstone.
[ Mike Royko, b. 1932

Change for the sake of change is the ideology of the cancer cell.
------Edward Abbey

Before a fish in a brook, all men are equal.
--- Herbert Hoover

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
- Ann Landers

He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much.
--Thomas Fuller, M.D. (1654-1734)


His huff arrived, and he departed in it.

Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.

The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.

Many of us spend half of our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't
spend half our time wishing.

All things i would like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.
[What's the original wording of that, anyway?]

The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm.

I have no need for your God-damned sympathy. I wish only to be entertained
by some of your grosser reminiscences.
-----------------Alexander Woollcott

I learned ... that one can never go back, that one should not ever try
to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really
a one-way street, isn't it? -- Agatha Christie


LIFE: To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis: to be
the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and
passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of
lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all
kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who
troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come
and where you are going! That is what is called the most important
gift of our parents and nature. Life.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge . . .
observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation
collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the
result of that combination.
/
Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound,
and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined;
and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
/
Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them
remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt
the mass so that it flows forth.
/
In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do
anything more than push it as far as it will go.
/
Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
/
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
/
It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit,
and gives it to those who have none.
- Denis Diderot



Some races of men seem molded in wax, soft and melting, at once
plastic and feeble. Some races, like some metals, combine the greatest
flexibility with the greatest strength. But the Indian is hewn out of
a rock. You cannot change the form without destruction of the substance.
/
Of the Indian character, much has been written foolishly, and
credulously believed. By the rhapsodies of poets, the cant of
sentimentalists, and the extravagance of some who should have known
better, a counterfeit image has been tricked out, which might seek in
vain for its likeness through every corner of the habitable earth; an
image bearing no more resemblance to its original than the monarch of
the tragedy and the hero of the epic poem bear to their living
prototypes in the palace and the camp.
/
Nature has stamped the Indian with a hard and stern physiognomy.
Ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy, are his ruling passions; and his
cold temperament is little exposed to those effeminate vices which are
the bane of milder races. With him revenge is an overpowering
instinct; nay, more, it is a point of honor and a duty. His pride sets
all language at defiance. He loathes the thought of coercion; and few
of his race have ever stooped to discharge a menial office. A wild
love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of
his character, and fire his whole existence.
/
Over all emotion he throws the veil of an iron self-control,
originating in a peculiar form of pride, and fostered by rigorous
discipline from childhood upward. He is trained to conceal passion,
and not to subdue it. The inscrutable warrior is aptly imaged by the
hackneyed figure of a volcano covered with snow; and no man can say
when or where the wild-fire will burst forth. This shallow
self-mastery serves to give dignity to public deliberation, and
harmony to social life. Wrangling and quarrel are strangers to an
Indian dwelling; and while an assembly of the ancient Gauls was
garrulous as a convocation of magpies, a Roman senate might have taken
a lesson from the grave solemnity of an Indian council. In the midst
of his family and friends, he hides affections, by nature none of the
most tender, under a mask of icy coldness; and in the torturing fires
of his enemy, the haughty sufferer maintains to the last his look of
grim defiance.
-------Francis Parkman

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-- H. L. Mencken

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most
daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell the truth. Mencken, H.L.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
--H.L. Mencken

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
--H.L.Mencken

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is
always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and
wrong.
Henry Louis Mencken, "The Divine Afflatus," New York Evening Mail,
November 15, 1917; Prejudices: Second Series, 1920

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which
is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented. H.L.
Mencken

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children are smart.
---H. L. Mencken

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
-----H. L. Mencken

No one in this world, as far as I know.... has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain
people.
--H.L.Mencken , Notes on journalism, Chicago Tribune Sept. 19, 1926


I did it to myself. It wasn't society...it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't
being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.
Ray Charles, on his heroin addiction


Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard**
---e e cummings


A person educated in mind and not in morals is a menace to society.
--Juanita Kidd Stout

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.
--Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852)

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.
-- The Duke of Wellington, when referred to as Irish 


There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like
an idiot.

Steven Wright


He was the only
really independent person
—boy or man—
in the community,
and by consequence
he was tranquilly
and continously happy
and was envied by all of us.

Mark Twain
of Tom Blankenship,
real-life model for Huckleberry Finn.

For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late.
For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and
puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks.
--Eugene O' Neill (1888-1953)

"Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much
different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. "Oh no,
the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me some silver and I'll
make him spit her out."
--P.J.O'Rourke


One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible by people falling in Love."
- Einstein, Albert

"Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan"

You must have the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts.
--Voltaire (1694-1778)


In certain trying circumstances,
urgent circumstances,
desperate circumstances,
profanity furnishes a relief
denied even to prayer.

- Mark Twain


No, I don't understand my husband's theory of
relativity, but I know my husband and I know he
can be trusted.
--Elsa Einstein

"He was born with the gift of laughter and the knowledge that the world was mad."

- Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

I beg you, do not be unchangeable.
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that he alone has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul
--
A man like that, when you know him, turns out
empty.

- Sophocles


In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is insane.


A committee is an animal with four back legs.
-- John Le Carre

A committee is a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.

A Committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but
as a group decide that nothing can be done.

A committee is group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do
the unnecessary.
-- Carl Byers

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.
-- Robert Heinlein

God so loved the world that He didn't send a committee.


You think your pain and your heartbreak
are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me
that the things that tormented me most
were the very things that connected me
with all the people who were alive,
or who had ever been alive.

- James Baldwin

The astronomers must be very clever to have found out the
names of all the stars.
    -- unknown

"We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust our sails"

"Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."
Samuel Johnson


Change for the sake of change is the ideology of the cancer cell. Edward
Abbey


"O quam cito transit gloria mundi."
[how swiftly passes away wordly glory]
-- Thomas a'Kempis, "De Imitatione Christi"

"Glorious men are the scorn of wise men,
the admiration of fools, the idols of parasites,
and the slaves of their own vaunts."
-- Francis Bacon, "Essays"

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does
not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss
also looks into you. -- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil_ (1885-86)

He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the
grave.
-- Matthew Henry


"The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history,
the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult
to find...."
--Terry Pratchett, _Sourcery_, in anthology _Rincewind the Wizzard_


When I had money everyone called me brother.
--Polish proverb

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls
and looks like work.
--Thomas Edison

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face.
Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day
in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
--Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
_Hunted Down_

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating. By a small sample we may
judge the whole piece."
- Don Quixote

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible by people falling in Love."
- Einstein, Albert

The quality of the average conversation could be enormously
improved by the constant use of four simple words: "I do not
know."
- Andre Maurois

"When I see a person smile I check the eyes to see it's true,
For when a person TRULY smiles, the eyes will smile too!"
---Belinda Williams

I never knew a good workman who was a good talker, or a good talker who was
a good workman.
--Stanley Baldwin


"Those on top of the mountain didn't fall there."
- Author not Known

"It's not who is right, but what is right that is of importance."
--Thomas Huxley

"There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind
conservatism."
--Henry George

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.
--Margot Asquith (1864-1945)

"Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising." -
Cyril Connolly, British journalist-writer (1903-1974)


While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity.
--Publilius Syrus

"I think, therefore, I am confused." -- RAW

"For some reason, the act of talking to Absolute Evil makes chocolate
syrup drip from your pineal Gland."
-- LeTeXan, "Today's Suck" 6/3/97

If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful
that you are sure to stumble over something.
-- Gertrude Stein

All men should try to learn
before they die
what they are running from,
and to, and why
- James Thurber

"If you can not answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still
call him vile names."
-- Elbert Hubbard

"Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in?
I think that is how dogs spend their lives."
--Sue Murphy

"There is no single, correct pathway on the web, or in life. Mistrust
anybody who tells you so."
-- James Burke, _The Pinball Effect_

"The Creation of the Universe was made possible by a grant from Texas
Instruments."
-- Credits, The Creation of the Universe Show (PBS)

Brain cells come and brain cells go,
but fat cells live forever.

Time may be a great healer,
but it's also a lousy beautician.

Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember, amateurs built the ark.
Professionals built the Titanic.

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.

Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.

Stupidity got us into this mess ...
why can't it get us out?

Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there.

Politicians and diapers have one thing in common.
They should both be changed regularly...and for the same reason.

I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path.

Anything free is worth what you pay for it.

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

It hurts to be on the cutting edge.

If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

I always wanted to be a procrastinator, never got around to it.

I am a nutritional overachiever.

My inferiority complex is not as good as yours.

I am having an out-of-money experience.

I plan on living forever.
So far, so good.

I'm not afraid of heights,
just afraid of widths.

Practice safe eating,
always use condiments.

I have kleptomania,
but when it gets bad I take something for it.

If marriage were outlawed,
only outlaws would have in-laws.

I am not a perfectionist.
My parents were, though.

You're getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking
chair that you once got from a roller coaster.

An optimist thinks that this is the best possible world.
A pessimist fears that this is true.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them
that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

The real art of conversation
is not only to say the right thing at the right time,
but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Age doesn't always bring wisdom.
Sometimes age comes alone.

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think
about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the
solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
-- Buckminster Fuller

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse
every time Congress meets." -- Will Rogers

"Never rotate a cube. It wastes your time and annoys the cube."
-- David Fischer

At nineteen I was a stranger to myself. At forty I asked: Who
am I? At fifty I concluded that I would never know.
    -- Edward Dahlberg, _The Confessions of..._, 1971

"Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of
light between two eternities of darkness.
(Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory")

Patrick
"If God is watching us, the least we can do is be entertaining".


Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off
his goal.
--- E. Joseph Crossman

Commercials have become the most pervasive music in the
history of--er, civilization.
    -- Jack Kroll, _Newsweek_, Mar. 31, 1975

A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only
comfort the afflicted--it should afflict the comfortable.
-- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, _Macy's Gimbels and Me_, 1967

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history".
Bertrand Russell.

The farther backward you can look, the farther
forward you are likely to see.
--Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965)

"To copy from one learned book is a plagiarism
To copy from two learned books is an essay
To copy from three learned books is a dissertation
To copy from four learned books is a fifth learned book"
(author is unknown, but the original was in German)

"[He] had the arrogant humility of the man who has learned so much that he is
aware of his own ignorance."
--Robert A. Heinlein,

"Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you
can't measure, weigh, nor taste it -- but thoughts are the most real things in
the Galaxy."
--Robert A. Heinlein,
_Citizen of the Galaxy_ p 146

Personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness.--
Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper Collins,1995, p11

We still have to find some way of combining Christian charity with
sensible social policy-- Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper
Collins,1995, p11

Boredom is ... a vital consideration for the moralist, since
at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
-- Bertrand Russell

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