--
At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism... You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.
- William Johnson Cory
19th Century Headmaster at Eton
--
To embrace the child may threaten the adult who values information above wonder, entertainment above play, and intelligence above ignorance. If we were really to care for the child, we would have to face our own lower natures - our indomitable emotions, our insane desires, and the vast range of our incapacity.
- Thomas Moore
--
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.
- Albert Camus
--
1. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
- Charles Beard
When asked if he could summarize the lessons of history in a short book, said he could do it in four sentences.
--
I find I have a splendid appetite for the kindness of those I respect.
- Patrick O'Brian
--
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive.
- James Baldwin
--
Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
--
What if we joined our sorrows? What if that is joy?
- Ross Gay
--
Simplicity has always been where we try to gain understanding.
- John Glass
--
I can get along in high society and I can get along in prison.
I just can't get along in a shopping mall.
- John Waters
--
A witty saying proves nothing.
- Voltaire
--
Things don't really end, they just stop for a while and then they start up again, like a bad record.
- Philip Kerr
From "Prussian Blue"
--
Words are like harpoons, once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.
- Fred Hoyle
--
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Benjamin Franklin
--
In any interpersonal contest involving questions of malice, stupidity, or insecurity; bet on insecurity.
- Steve Midgley
--
What's really difficult is to praise someone precisely.
- George Saunders
--
There is no pleasure in achievement if it is not shared.
- Lt Col Charity Adams
The highest ranking African American female officer in the European Theater during World War II
--
When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
--
Sometimes, you go crazy, but you not crazy. You hurting.
- Felicia "Snoop" Pearson
on the death of Michael K. Williams
--
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
- Bertrand Russell
--
This is the meaning of life, my friend. To know when you are well off and to hate or envy no man.
- Philip Kerr
From "Field Gray"
--
Does not every human story open midscene?
- Kerry Howley
From "Thrown"
--
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
- Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
--
The brain can be hoodwinked, but not the stomach
- Rex Stout
--
Having lots of money is no guarantee of good taste, but it can make the lack of it more glaringly obvious.
- Philip Kerr
From "The Pale Criminal"
--
All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
- J. Krishnamurti
--
I wish I had a cause because I've got a lot of enthusiasm.
- Mort Sahl
--
I hate groups of people with a common purpose.
- George Carlin
--
I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came.
- Kameron Hurley
From "The Light Brigade"
--
The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it.
- Norman Augustine
--
Truth itself is a rhetorical term.
- Paul Feyerabend
--
The truth is a matter of the imagination.
- Ursala K. Le Guin
--
Everything is an accident.
- Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
--
Physicists know that every equation is a lie.
- Gregory Chaitin
--
Physics doesn't tell us how nature is, it only tells what we can say about nature.
- Markus Aspelmeyer
--
Our ability to describe the universe with simple, elegant models stems in large part from our lack of data, our ignorance.
- John Horgan
--
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
- Richard Feynman
--
A true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.
- Burt Rutan
--
When stupid ideas work, they become genius ideas.
- Andy Weir
--
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
- Michael Pollan
--
Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.
- Claude Bernard
--
I hate losing and I don't handle it very well, and I always cope with it by thinking that I should be better at not losing, instead of being better at handling it.
- Magnus Carlsen
--
The art of engineering is living with imperfections.
- Steve Midgley
--
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
- Pablo Picasso
--
I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996)
When informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.
--
I remember when computers were frustrating because they *did* exactly what you told them to. That actually seems sort of quaint now.
-J.D. Baldwin
--
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound /
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
- Alexander Pope
--
I hope, there will be no Reason to doubt;
Particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is coucht underneath.
- Jonathan Swift
--
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
-George Orwell
--
That is the problem with words — they nail the thought down, make it explicit, fix it, crucify it on the cross of exact meaning. But life has no exact meanings, only shades of meaning, hints, versions and contradictions, a confusion of loves and hates, of motives and desires.
- Simon Mawer
From "Tightrope"
--
Knowledge is power.
- Francis Bacon
--
To hold a pen is to be at war.
- Voltaire
--
Music is a weapon.
- Fela Kuti
--
We were like punk scientists.
- Gerald Casale
On Devo
--
The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
- Mel Lazarus
--
A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand.
- Akira Kurasawa
--
Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.
- Sharon Stone
--
Truth is a pathless land
- J. Krishnamurti
--
The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling
- Ursala K. Le Guin
--
All any administration wants from the prison system is that it remains invisible.
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
- Raymond Chandler
--
Process is where innovation goes to die.
- Steve Midgley
--
Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.
- William Shakespeare
Henry VI, part 1
--
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
- Evelyn Waugh
--
Discomfort reveals worlds.
- Sara Ahmed
--
Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.
- Abraham Lincoln
--
Fear is the enemy of progress.
- Steve Midgley
--
The law is an envious monster.
- Rex Stout
--
A lie goes half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get his pants on.
- Winston Churchill
--
Innocence has no contract with bliss.
- Rex Stout
--
I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one.
- George Bernard Shaw
to Winston Churchill
--
Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.
- Winston Churchill
in response
--
Banditry. A euphemism for it is international finance.
- Rex Stout
--
Written text is a primitive but powerful form of virtual reality.
- Paul Brooks
--
Show me the child who dreams of being a sausage case inspector.
- David Sedaris
--
When people learn - as I doubt they will - that they can't get something for nothing, crime will diminish and we shall all live in greater harmony.
- "Yellow Kid" Weil
One of America's most successful con men
--
Failure in any large-scale system is the normal case, not the exception.
- Werner Vogels
--
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
- Jack Handey
From Deep Thoughts
--
The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake...
- Nelson Boswell
--
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
- Albert Einstein
--
The average person, in my estimation, is ninety-nine per cent animal and one per cent human. The ninety-nine per cent animal causes very little trouble. But the one per cent human causes all our woe.
- "Yellow Kid" Weil
One of America's most successful con men
--
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
- Upton Sinclair
--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.
- Erwin Knoll
--
Our task is far from absurd or hopeless... we undertake the most exquisite and noble of tasks: to unveil this place we call home, to revel in the wonders we discover, and to hand off our knowledge to those who follow.
- Brian Greene
--
I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.
- Richard Nixon
Describing his ideal candidate for IRS commissioner. Recorded on tape, May 13th 1971.
--
Idealism dies hard with everybody.
- Michael Connelly
--
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
--
You cannot extrapolate that much from a sample size of one.
- Nate Silver
--
1964:
Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as telephone service is today.
- Martin Greenberger
--
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
1953
--
1946:
It may well be that the high-speed digital computer will have as great an influence on civilization as the advent of nuclear power.
- Douglas Hartree
--
1937:
There is no practical obstacle whatsoever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind.
- H G Wells
--
1895:
[By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation] to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone [and] to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.
- Max Nordau
--
1851:
By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence!
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
--
1842:
The Analytical Engine is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever.
- Ada Lovelace
--
In America, anyone can become President. That's the problem.
- George Carlin
--
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
- Frank Dane
--
An honest politician is one who, when bought, will stay bought.
- Simon Cameron
--
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
- Gandhi
--
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
- Maya Angelou
--
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein
--
I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.
- Horace Lamb
--
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
- Theodore Parker
--
I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family. When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives. Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.
- Albert Einstein (written in old age)
--
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
- Winston Churchill
--
Chance does occasionally operate with a sort of fumbling coherence readily mistakable for the workings of a self-conscious Providence.
- Eric Ambler
From "A Coffin for Dimitrios"
--
The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.
- Michael Pollan
--
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
- Jeremy S. Anderson
--
If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard, the first thing typed would be a unix command.
- Bill Lye
--
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
- Robert Wilensky
--
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
- James Madison
--
A peacetime economy is at war with itself.
- Steve Midgley
--
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
- Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II)
--
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
- Charlotte Whitton
--
Hope and luck are close friends.
- Steve Midgley
--
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe.
- Abe Lincoln
--
The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson
--
I will be treble-sinewed, hearted, breathed,
And fight maliciously; for when mine hours
Were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives
Of me for jests; but now I'll set my teeth
And send to darkness all that stop me.
- William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra
--
One can never give an ultimate, absolute proof that a proof in some system is correct. Of course, one can give a proof of a proof, or a proof of a proof of a proof but the validity of the outermost system always remains an unproven assumption, accepted on faith.
- Douglas Hofstadter
--
Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality, and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.
- Albert Einstein
--
One of the most important things I learned while at university was that all large organizations are dysfunctional.
- Steve Midgley
--
If there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
- Eric Ambler
A Coffin for Dimitrios
--
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
- James Baldwin
--
The criminal lawyer, like the criminal, is the enemy of Law and Order. The criminal attacks society head on; the lawyer is trying to set you free after you have been caught so that you can go out and steal some more. Whether he succeeds or not, he profits from your crime. The only way you can pay him is out of the money you have got away with at one time or another, everybody knows that. It isn't called his share of the loot, of course. It's called "the fee." But that's only because he has a license that entitles him to do what he's doing, and you haven't.
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.
- Richard Feynman
--
The secret to programming is having smart friends.
- Ron Avitzur
--
By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates
--
Sometimes the whole of marriage [is] a cover story.
- John le Carré
From "Silverview"
--
If there is no God, Not everything is permitted to man. He is still his brother's keeper And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, By saying that there is no God.
- Czeslaw Milosz
--
But that's what the law always comes down to, doesn't it?
A quibble over words?
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
- Fjodor M. Dostojewski
--
'Objective' is subjective.
- Art Bell
--
It is not hard to know that a butterfly's wings flapping in Tokyo will affect the weather in Los Angeles. It is only hard to know which butterfly.
- Steve Midgley
--
I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.
- Groucho Marx
--
A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.
- Michael Winner
--
History is a vast morality play in which mankind's higher aspirations are forever being crushed to earth.
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
Now, there's three things you can do in a baseball game. You can win, or you can lose, or it can rain.
- Casey Stengel
--
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who no longer pauses to wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead.
- Albert Einstein
--
One must suffer to be beautiful.
- French proverb
--
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
- Unknown
--
There are innocent people in prison, don't kid yourself. There aren't that many of them, don't kid yourself about that either.
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
- F. Dostoyevski
--
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
- Henry Miller
--
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
- Harold J. Smith
--
Having lots of money is no guarantee of good taste, but can
make the lack of it more glaringly obvious.
- Philip Kerr
--
The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.
- Karl Marx
--
Rulers tend to dislike those who break rules.
- Pierce Brown
--
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
- Ursala K. Le Guin
From: The Left Hand of Darkness
--
Rarely are members of the same family born under the same roof. The ties that truly bind us are of love not blood.
- Richard Bach
--
You keep making decisions, even if they are wrong.
- Joe Simpson
After spending 4 days alone climbing down the Siula Grande Mountain with a compound leg fracture.
--
A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
- Aldous Huxley
--
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
- Sydney Harris
--
Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing.
- Karl Lehenbauer
--
I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.
- Chauncey Depew
--
It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
- Andrew J. Holmes
--
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
- Edmund Burke
--
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
- C.S. Lewis
--
Without love intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence love is not enough.
- Ashley Montagu
--
Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them.
- Trevor Noah
From "Born a Crime"
--
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
- William Shakespeare
Sonnet 29
--
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
- Bertrand Russell
--
He took the bride about the neck and kissed
her lips with such a clamorous smack that at
the parting all the church did echo.
- William Shakespeare
--
This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.
- Henry David Thoreau
--
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
- Ogden Nash
--
This revolution won't be the last.
- The Addicts
--
I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
- Gandhi
--
One of these days, the people are going to demand peace of the government, and the government is going to have to give it to them.
- Dwight Eisenhower
--
The ideologies, the left, right or center, are put together by study, by the activity of thought, weighing, judging and coming to a conclusion, and so shutting the door on all fuller inquiry.
- J. Krishnamurti
--
Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.
- Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)
Odes
--
There falls no shadow where There shines no sun.
- Hilaire Belloc
--
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- William Gibson
--
If you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps the religion;
and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect;
but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult.
- Leo Pfeffer
--
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to.
- Raymond Chandler
--
All fiction is metaphor.
- Ursala K. Le Guin
--
The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.
- Dashiell Hammet
--
13 billion emails sent every day are unsolicited junk mail. 90% of these are sent by fewer than 200 people.
- Evan I. Schwartz
MIT Technology Review
--
Augustine's Second Law of Socioscience: For every scientific (or engineering)
action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.
- Norman Augustine
--
Most police cases involve misery and wretchedness - not crimes and scandals.
- Soren Kierkegaard
--
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
- Robert Kennedy
--
A high church for the true mediocre.
- Norman Mailer
on the FBI
--
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
- Colonel Adolphus Busch
--
All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit. But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then we shall not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.
- Albert Einstein
--
The UNIX philosophy basically involves giving you enough rope to hang yourself.
And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure.
- Folk wisdom
--
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
- Theodore Sturgeon
--
What the Markets love best about Singapore is what is absent: Politics
- Thomas Frank
--
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe"
Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
- Koan by Danny Hillis
on Marvin Minsky and Gerald Sussman
--
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected-those, precisely, who need the laws's protection most!-and listens to their testimony.
- James Baldwin
--
There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
--
The Market is a God that sucks.
- Thomas Frank
--
Rain is the best policeman.
- Police motto
--
There are no wars to end all wars. Conflict and warfare are a permanent part of the human condition. It is far more useful to think of war as a single, inseparable thread running throughout the fabric of human history rather than as separate, disconnected episodes.
- George Friedman
--
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
- Albert Einstein
--
A metaphor is like a simile.
- Steven Wright
--
Putting the F back in Art.
- Dillinger Four
--
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
- Ingrid Bergman
--
Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
- Thomas Moore
--
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you?
Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
- Victor Hugo
--
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
--
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
- George Bernard Shaw
--
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
--
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
- Georges Clemenceau (1841 - 1929)
--
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
- Raymond Chandler
--
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban
Israeli Diplomat
--
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
- Mel Brooks
--
History is cunning and inscrutable.
- Walden Bello
--
There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look in the glass and wonder.
- Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler)
--
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
- Walter Bagehot
--
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
- Mark Twain
--
Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
- Robert Benchley
--
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
- Dave Barry
--
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
- Judge Billings Learned Hand
--
I think I think; therefore, I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce
--
I wish Sinatra would just shut up and sing.
- Lauren Bacall
--
If you believe in an ideal, you don't own you, it owns you.
- Raymond Chandler
--
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.
- Albert Camus
--
Let a good man do good deeds with the same zeal that the evil man does bad ones.
- The Belzer Rabbi
--
Every bit of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile available to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay from ever impeding the upward curve of profitability. This is the real story of life under the Markets.
- Thomas Frank
--
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
--
The roots of heaven are in living and dying
- J. Krishnamurti
--
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful
- Friedrich Nietzsche
--
Ideologies have existed perhaps as long as man can remember. They are like belief or faith that separate man from man.
- J. Krishnamurti
--
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
- Joe Ancis
--
Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies.
- Gene Hill
--
An inch of time cannot be bought with an inch of gold.
- Chinese Proverb
--
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
- Raymond Chandler
--
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
- Ursala K. Le Guin
--
Whatever it is... I'm against it.
- Groucho Marx
--
Errors like straws upon the surface flow /
Who would search for pearls must dive below.
- John Dryden
--
Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.
- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
--
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
- George McGovern
--
That is nonsense up with which I shall not put.
- Winston Churchill
on dangling prepositions.
--
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
--
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
--
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
- Groucho Marx
--
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
--
You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.
- Al Capone
--
Justice is incidental to law and order.
- J. Edgar Hoover
--
It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.
- Willie Sutton
One of America's most successful bank robbers. He died with his liberty in Spring Hill, Florida in 1980.
--
Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.
- Robert D. Sprecht
Rand Corporation
--
Quote me as saying I was misquoted
- Groucho Marx
--
It may be true that the law can not make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important...
- Martin Luther King Jr.
--
This country only likes dead radicals.
- Harry Belafonte
on the United States
--
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
- Steven Wright
--
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
- Aurobindo Ghose
Indian philosopher (1872-1950)
--
Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why?
Because the official is so impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality
- S. Kierkegaard
--
You know who really digs Kant's categorical imperative, by the way? Nerds and cowards. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to make decisions about right and wrong for yourself, on a case-by-case basis. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a good book, and you could just follow the directions in it to the letter and be assured you'd never step on anyone's toes, never piss anyone off, never do anything wrong. But life isn't, you know, neat like that.
- Dexter Palmer
From "Version Control"
--
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
- Pablo Picasso
--
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
- Kafka's Law
--
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."
- Vine Deloria Jr.
--
Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it.
- Andrew Young
--
I would have made a good Pope.
- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
--
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
--
Why don't you write books people can read?
- Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
--
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
- Dr. Seuss
--
If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.
- A film director
--
I think it would be a good idea.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
When asked what he thought of Western civilization
--
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
- Seamus Heaney
1995 Nobel Prize Acceptance Lecture (Stockholm)
--
Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
--
Plato was a bore.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
--
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
--
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
--
Hemingway was a jerk.
- Harold Robbins
--
Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.
--
Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech, you can't say whatever you want about a company.
- John Roberts
A Minneapolis attorney, referring to NorthWest Airlines' 1990s-era search and seizure of employees' home computers.
--
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
- Anonymous
--
History is fables agreed upon.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
--
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
--
Difficulties increase the nearer we approach our goal.
- Goethe (1749-1832)
--
My friends are my estate.
- Emily Dickinson
American poet (1830-1886)
--
One goes through life like a flower with its face turned to the sun, ever seeking, ever hoping, wanting to trust others, but afraid to do so.
- Eric Ambler
A Coffin for Dimitrios
--
Even the most honest person has many faces, none of which are false.
- Dexter Palmer
From "Version Control"
--
(William F.) Buckley's ahistorical and fictional reference amount to no more than a mirror into his mind: a fictionalized but disgusting melange of stereotypes, demeaning illogic about other cultures worsened by a crude, rude misunderstanding of what informs the normative values, struggles, aspirations and realities of Black folks, especially.
- Chido Nwangwu
The Black Business Journal
--
To talk goodness is not good... Only to do it is.
- Chinese Proverb
--
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain
--
Give me chastity and continence, but just not now.
- St. Augustine
--
Elitists aren't those who run the world: they are those who criticize the CEO's.
- Thomas C. Frank
Le Monde
--
Speak the truth, then leave quickly.
- Serbian Proverb
--
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
- Ozzie Osborne
--
Isn't Disney World a People Trap Operated by a Mouse?
- Steven Wright
--
It's Dianetics for the new breed of international profiteers.
- Thomas C. Frank
On the globalization of capitalism
--
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
- William Somerset Maugham
--
God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
- H.L. Mencken
--
Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.
- Plato
--
Crime does not pay .. as well as politics.
- Alfred E. Newman
--
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
- Charles de Gaulle
--
Some of the busiest people in the world are only picking up the beans they spilled.
- Anonymous
--
Our unparalleled prosperity has not been an unmixed good. It has inflamed cupidity, has diseased the imagination with dreams of boundless success, and plunged a vast multitude into excessive toils, feverish competitions, and exhausting cares.
- William Ellery Channing
"On the Elevation Of The Laboring Classes"
--
There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer and the poor get it in the winter.
- Bat Masterson
--
Say the opposite, say the same thing.
- Ze Frank
on political speech
--
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
--
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
--
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- Anatole France
--
Talk doesn't cook rice.
- Chinese proverb
--
Hope is bulletproof, truth just hard to hit.
- Christopher Moore
--
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
--
If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness.
- Jack Handey
From Deep Thoughts
--
'Automatic' simply means that you can't repair it yourself.
- Mary H. Waldrip
--
osculate (OS-kyuh-layt) tr.verb
1. To kiss.
2. Mathematics. To have three or more points coincident with.
--
What is done well is done quickly enough.
- Augustus Caesar
--
Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
- Margaret Lee Runbeck
--
Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.
- R.E. Shay
--
If today is the first day of the rest of your life, what was yesterday?
--
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
- Boris Pasternak
--
"Even [the] most pessimistic estimate...would provide 1,564 addresses for each square meter of the surface of the planet Earth. The optimistic estimate would allow for 3,911,873,538,269,506,102
addresses for each square meter of the surface of the planet Earth."
- Specification from the next Internet Protocol, regarding the number of nodes (computers) which it will be possible to access from the new network.
--
How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.
--
It is bad luck to be superstitious.
- Andrew Mathis
--
That's the problem with having a skill: once you swear it off, you know you're stuck with it forever.
- David Sedaris
--
There are 2 rules to success in life.
1. Don't tell people everything you know.
--
"We want to be fed with a large wooden spoon and, like the Korean babies, be patted on the stomach with the back of the spoon so as to get in a little more than would otherwise be the case. In short, we want to be overfed, grossly overfed, yes, very grossly overfed on nothing but porridge and sugar, black currant and apple pudding and cream, cake, milk, eggs, jam, honey and bread and butter till we burst, and we'll shoot the man who offers us meat. We don't want to see or hear of any more meat as long as we live"
- Thomas H. Ordes-Lee
1915. Antarctic shipwreck survivor and castaway, who lived with his mates for over a year on mainly seal meat.
--
I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but I still keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
- David Sedaris
--
The quality of a Led Zeppelin song is in direct proportion to how many times the word "baby" is repeated.
- Necia Dallas
--
I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
- Douglas Adams
--
The internet is a great way to kill some time... and lets be honest, time deserves it.
- Zubin Sedghi
--
Jesus is coming. Look busy.