Quote-o-rama:
The Fourteenth Miscellaneous File
"When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered." -Dorothy Thompson "There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge." -Bertrand Russell "According to a Finnish medical study, if you have a bad or incompetent boss, it increases your risk of a heart attack by 30%. More bad news for Dick Cheney." -Jay Leno "I once punched a bloke in the face for saying _Hawk The Slayer_ was rubbish, when what I should have said was 'Dad, you're wrong.'" -Bill Bailey "Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated." -George Santayana "The two worst things we teach our children is that a knowledge of science is nice, but not necessary, and that a knowledge of sex is necessary, but not nice." -Marilyn Vos Savant "Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined." -Johnny Carson "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." -George Bernard Shaw "What's maddening here is the unblushing hypocrisy of the right wing and the way it circulates - usually through Web sites or talk radio - personal vilification to abort honest political debate." -E.J. Dionne Jr., WashingtonPost.com, 2006 "He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money." -Benjamin Franklin "If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied." -Alfred Nobel "I doubt anybody gets taken seriously for very long. I'll be on some reality show in about six years going, `Hey, I had a great year in 2006.'" -George Clooney, 2006 "The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well." -Horace Walpole "If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much." -Lewis Carroll "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -George Orwell "I will go out on a limb and say 20 years from now people will look back and say: 'What were they thinking? They're in the middle of an epidemic and kids are watching 20,000 hours of commercials for junk food.'" -Dr. Thomas Frieden, 2005, on diabetes "The size and audacity of the Abramoff conspiracy was made possible only by an explicit and premeditated program initiated by Tom DeLay to strong-arm companies into hiring Republican lobbyists and, logic concludes, to strong-arm Republican members into accommodating Republican lobbyists... That is what made Abramoff possible. That is why this is a Republican scandal, even though he tried to bribe Democrats too." -Dick Meyer, CBSNews.com "History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light." -William L. Shirer "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." -Agnes de Mille "The devil is easy to identify. He appears when you're terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn't grant." -Fiorello LaGuardia "To have reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to possess a guiding principle. A belief of some kind. A bumper sticker, if you will." -Judith Guest "To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past." -Eric Hoffer "One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present." -Golda Meir "Mr Wells belongs to the non military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swash-buckling side of life, symbolized in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses." -George Orwell "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." -President George W. Bush, to FEMA Director Michael Brown, Spetember 2005 "...And finally, to Rob in Albany who felt my aside was proof of my intolerance and hypocrisy: Joking about Christianity isn't evidence that I'm intolerant . hell, I'm perfectly willing to tolerate Christians. I have never, for instance, attempted to prevent Christians from marrying each other, or tried to stop them from adopting children, or worked to make it illegal for them to hold certain jobs. I don't threaten to boycott companies that market their products to Christians, and I don't organize letter-writing campaigns to complain about Christian characters on television. "It would indeed be hypocritical for me to complain about fundamentalist Christians who've done all of the above to gay people if I turned around and did the same thing to Christians - but, again, I've done no such thing. Intolerant? Hell, I'm a model of tolerance! Oh sure, I joked about the Virgin Birth because I think it's silly and sexphobic. And I'm free to say as much, however unpleasant it is for some Christians to hear. Fundamentalist Christians, for their part, are free to think homosexuality is sinful and unnatural, and they're free to say so, however unpleasant it is for me to hear. But fundamentalists aren't willing to just speak their piece, Rob. Nope, they seek to persecute people for being gay, and that's where their low opinion of homosexuality - which, again, they have an absolute right to hold - transubstantiates into intolerance." -Dan Savage, _Savage Love_ "Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills." -Minna Antrim "C'mon, guys, it's the 21st century - James Bond is as relevant as the hula-hoop, no matter who's playing him. " -FilmThreat, 2005 "True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success; the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world." -Felix Emmanuel Schelling "Can you imagine a more faithless pursuit than trying to prove the existence of God?" -Eugene Robinson, WashingtonPost.com "We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate." -Eric Hoffer "I mean, this is not Madison, Wisconsin, where you expect those people to be communing with Satan." -Bill O'Reilly "I'm counting on the Internet to destroy the music industry. That's its first job. Then I'd like to see it take on the movie world. I would have lived on the Internet as a kid. I would have been not me, which is what I wanted to be all my life." -Joss Whedon "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." -C.S. Lewis "We're getting shown a lot of love, but we're also getting a lot of stares like we're aliens or something. Am I the only person out here with dreadlocks?" -Shelvin Cooter, Katrina refugee relocated to Salt Lake City, Sept 2005 "The spirit of Christmas is, in fact, no departure from [John Waters'] usual fare. Take his most recent feature, 2004's _A Dirty Shame_, which got slapped with an NC-17 by the prigs at the MPAA. The film is about a group of sex addicts, led by a mystical 'sexual healer,' that overtakes a working-class neighborhood in Charm City. "As always, Waters is unwavering in his fundamental message: No matter how sick, twisted or downright creative your own personal perversion is, so long as nobody gets hurt (beyond the occasional truly royal case of indigestion), you have the right to exercise it freely and I have the right to find it fascinating, repulsive, ridiculous and/or delightful. "When such a theme is stated so baldly, certain words come to mind - words like 'tolerance,' 'compassion,' 'vomit' and yes, 'America.' Down below the many layers of smut and slime, John Waters is the ultimate champion of the values we hold dear. "Most moral pundits pay lip service to the notion of loving your neighbor, preaching hatred and exclusion all the while. But Waters, God bless him, actually believes - however strange, however warped, however dysfunctional we may be - we are all family. And that, friends, is the True Meaning of Christmas. -Glenn Dixon, Washington Post Express, 12/22/2005 "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan "All sins are attempts to fill voids." -Simone Weil "Political chaos is connected with the decay of language. One can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." -George Orwell "Originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle." -Feodor Dostoyevsky "Since the dawn of film, every decade has had its own genuine flavor of cinematic output. Years down the line, when we look back at this decade, all we're going to see is a vast wasteland of needless remakes, an awful mix of flavors that were never meant to be. The movie industry is suffering a major creative drought right now and there is no sign of improvement in sight." -FilmThreat, 2005 "Untilled ground, however rich, will bring forth thistles and thorns; so also the mind of man." -St. Teresa of Avila "We don't thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient." -Golda Meir, 1969 "The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century." -William Lyon Phelps "Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody." -Aaron Broussard, New Orleans, 4 Sept 2005 "I just want to ask, 'Is this jihad? Is this jihad against Iraqis?' I want to ask the mujahedeen, 'Do you slaughter your brother in the name of jihad?'" -Hassad Dawood, December 2005 "A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few." -Judge Learned Hand "Today, states collapse not because of [military] regiments but because they forget their language, culture and traditions." -Victor Yushchenko, 2005 "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." -George Orwell "No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men." -Thomas Babington Macaulay "The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won... Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero." -Bill Moyers "An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything." -Dame C.V. Wedgwood "It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means." -Lydia Maria Child "The first duty of love is to listen." -Paul Tillich "Standing up for free speech in the face of religious fanaticism should be automatic for anybody who understands the classical liberal principles upon which Western society was built." -Daveed Gartenstein-Ross "If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history." -Pierre Bayle "Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul." -Henry van Dyke "If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be no help." -speech to be delivered by President Kennedy, 22 Nov 1963 "Tidiness is one of those virtues that never will be assimilated with pleasure." -Dame Freya Stark "I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day." -Penn Jillette, from NPR's "This I Believe" "You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America." -Bourke Cockran "Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." -George Orwell "We are always doing, says he, something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us." -Joseph Addison "Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold." -Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald "Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route." -Sister Elizabeth Kenny "On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it." -James Fallows "The sin which makes you sad and repentant is more liked by Allah than the good deed which turns you arrogant." -Ali ibn Abi Talib "Congress today asked the president to give them updates on Iraq, and I can only say, that isn't happening? Maybe, uh, you guys suck worse than I thought." -Jon Stewart "Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them." -Gore Vidal "A lot of people are saying the reason President Bush went on this trip was to take a break from the critics, the critics who say he manipulated the truth, misled the public and supports torture. Well, he won't hear any complaints from the Chinese on that." -Jay Leno "The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future." -Norman O. Brown "Does the president think that the many generals, former top administration officials and senators from his own party who have joined over two-thirds of the country in questioning the president's handling of the war in Iraq are all unpatriotic too? The president does not have a monopoly on patriotism, and this is not a country where only those who agree with him support the troops and care about defending our country." -John Kerry, 2005 "I always think I should get on it if I want to have kids. Because once you hit thirty it can be difficult to conceive - it can be dangerous. The best time to conceive is when you're a black teenager." -Sarah Silverman, 2005 "The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base." -Paul Vixie, 2004 "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." -George Washington, 1797 "Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better." -Florence Nightingale "Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education." -Chuang-tzu "A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be large enough for our needs." -Arthur Balfour "A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains." -Maxim Gorky "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -George Orwell "In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou has attained it thou art a fool." -Simon Ben Azzai "When you're (a) sharing a set with Scott Bakula and (b) starring in a movie with the word 'Suspicion' in the title, you know that, somewhere along the line, your career took a wrong turn." -Fametracker.com "We brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system." -Patrick Fitzgerald, special counsel "Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities." -Christopher Morley "The first gulf war is obviously an event that impinges directly on the current situation, and yet at the same time it seems curiously remote. Its post-cold-war, pre-9/11 context is in some ways blurrier than more distant times. The war itself happened fast and left a confused legacy." -A.O. Scott, NYTimes.com "What is politics but persuading the public to vote for this and support that and endure these for the promise of those?" -Gilbert Highet "Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest." -Norman Douglas "When writers come, I find I'm talking all the time, exchanging thoughts I haven't exchanged for some time. I get stupid in solitude." -Mary McCarthy "Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time." -Soren Kierkegaard "I think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people." -Richard Avedon "News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity." -Bill Moyers "If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory." -Agesilaus II, King of Sparta "The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history." -George Orwell "What's the deal here? Why do costs outstrip inflation? A college education is one of the most expensive and important things you'll ever buy, and, yes, it's still a good value, blah, blah, blah, but you can find out more about a lot of other products." -Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education, 2005 "Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace." -Amelia Earhart "There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them." -Andre Gide "Conservatives - or better, pro-corporate apologists - hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like 'progress,' 'opportunity,' and 'individualism' into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right... This 'degenerate and unlovely age,' as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove - the reputed brain of George W. Bush - as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today." -Bill Moyers "The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism." -Reinhold Niebuhr "As of Oct. 20, the Second Amendment is probably in the best shape in this country that it's been in decades." Wayne Lapierre, NRA, 2005 "It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good." -Margaret Mead "The fact is this is an elite group of individuals. The fact is we want an elite group of individuals. I'm not so sure I want my next-door neighbor, as much as I like him or her, to be on the Supreme Court because they're nice people." -Senator Chuck Hagel (NE) 2005 "In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." -George Orwell "This Harriet Miers pick for the Supreme Court is turning out to be the most controversial pick involving the Supreme Court since...George Bush." -David Letterman "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -Abraham Lincoln "It was reported today that Democrats in California are trying to find a candidate to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger next year. Unfortunately, the only person who's as qualified as Arnold Schwarzenegger is Vin Diesel." -Conan O'Brien "Maybe failure needs me as its PR person, because it's near the top of everyone's list of horrors (only death and bad haircuts give it any significant challenge) - and yet often it's the one thing that lies between you and the happiest place you've ever been. Kind of like bridge traffic en route to the beach." -Carolyn Hax, WashingtonPost.com "Religion without joy - it is no religion." -Theodore Parker "If you haven't seen _America's Sweethearts_, you really can't conceive of how appallingly terrible it is." -Fametracker.com "I do not prize the word cheap. It is not a badge of honor... It is a symbol of despair. Cheap prices make for cheap goods; cheap goods make for cheap men; and cheap men make for a cheap country!" -William McKinley "This 'zeal for secrecy' I am talking about - and I have barely touched the surface - adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear - as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban - they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom of the press - that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg." -Bill Moyers, 2004 "If you want work well done, select a busy man - the other kind has not time." -Elbert Hubbard "The imperceptible process of age has a point which, once passed, cannot be retraced. I knew I had passed that point and was getting old the day I noticed that all the cops looked so young." -Harry Lewis Golden "I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't." -Alfred North Whitehead "There are plenty of fools in the world; but if they had not been sent for some wise purpose, they wouldn't have been here; and since they are here they have as good a right to have elbow-room in the world as the wisest." -Susan Edmonstone Ferrier "Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love." Marion Evans Cross, _The Mill on the Floss_ "One thing I learned from Abu Ghraib is that, if we didn't occasionally receive direct visual evidence of the mindset inside America's war machine, that consciousness would just be too inconceivable to be believed." -BAGnewsNotes.com "To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization." -George Orwell "I've often said that anyone who reaches their 20s without some form of baggage is not to be trusted." -Rachel P. "Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them." -Greta Garbo "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." -Jeseph Joubert "Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying." -Nikki Giovanni "We're going back to the drawing board. With an earthquake or a major terrorist attack, we'd obviously have no warning. We haven't looked at mass evacuation or temporary housing for hundreds of thousands of people." -Sandra Hutchens, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department "History is a pageant and not a philosopher." -Augustine Birrell "Better to be without logic than without feeling." -Charlotte Bronte "In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love." - Carl Jung "Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." -Chapman Cohen "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell "America has been called a melting pot, but it seems better to call it a mosaic, for in it each nation, people or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time its share to the unified pattern of a new nation." -King Baudouin I of Belgium "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." -William Faulkner "I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country." -Bill Moyers, 2005 "Censorship is the height of vanity." -Martha Graham "There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors." -Robert Oppenheimer "Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal." -Hannah More "How am I supposed to both watch the news *and* be sober? It's a paradox." -DieselSweeties.com "Where once Jackson's presence was enough to get us interested in a movie, these days the presence of Samuel L. Jackson in a movie is assurance only that somebody somewhere offered Samuel L. Jackson money to be in a movie." -Fametracker.com "Thursday is like Friday's Friday." -Jen R. "History is a pageant and not a philosopher." -Augustine Birrell "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America." -Bill Clinton "Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world." -Louis Pasteur "People do not live in the present always, at one with it. They live at all kinds of and manners of distance from it, as difficult to measure as the course of planets. Fears and traumas make their journeys slanted, peripheral, uneven, evasive." -Anais Nin "We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality." -Iris Murdoch "The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent." -Jim Showalter "No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism." -Bill Moyers, 2004 "Perhaps the programming geniuses who bought this show thought viewers would enjoy a fish-out-of-water-story. They should keep in mind what happens to real fish out of water: they flop around for a while, and then they die. Not long after that, they begin to stink." -Kevin McDonough "And the Third World will continue to beckon to the First, reminding it of the Galilean vision of Christian solidarity." -Penny Lernoux, 1989 "Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness." -Florida Scott-Maxwell [On space travel.] "We move into the universe. We name ourselves, along with our rockets, after old deities. We make ourselves central to existence, knowing not how far we must travel before we meet other mirrors of God staring back into His vast gaze." -Ray Bradbury "If television's a babysitter, the internet's a drunk librarian who won't shut up." -CatAndGirl.com "There is something almost surreal in the juxtaposition of President Bush's statements on Iraq and news reporting on the war. The two are simply irreconcilable." -Colbert I. King, WashingtonPost.com "No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius "I studied animal behavior and playwriting in college. I suppose if you combine the two, you end up with acting." -Liev Schreiber "City of Heroes: the cure to my online porn addiction." -Mark Waid, Wizard World LA 2005 "The chains which cramp us most are those which weigh on us least." -Anne Sophie Swetchine "Don't be silly! 'Vorpal' isn't even a word! It's just something marketers made up so suckers like you will want their swords. 'Vorpal blade' means just about as much as 'Flavor-Blasted Cheetos.'" -The Order of the Stick (giantitp.com) "It ain't enough to get the breaks. You gotta know how to use 'em." -Huey P. Long "Multiples theories for the decline [in the summer box office] abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough." -Sharon Waxman, NYTimes.com "To know a little less and to understand a little more: That, it seems to me, is our greatest need." -James Ramsey Ullman "That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous." -George Gissing "Revolt and terror pay a price. Order and law have a cost." -Carl Sandburg "When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps; when he says perhaps he means no; when he says no he is no diplomat." -anonymous "No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you." -Althea Gibson "History abhors determinism, but cannot tolerate chance." -Bernard De Voto "We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, of making winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times." -General Douglas MacArthur, 12 May 1962 "The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he hoped to make it." -Sir James Matthew Barrie "News coverage of a political campaign is oriented to a public that enjoys competitive sports, not to one that is civic-minded." -Richard Posner, NYTimes.com "One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it." -Elizabeth Bowen "Listen, you can send a stripper to my party if you like. It won't affect me because, as you can see, I am appearing naked, which I always try to do because I'm kind of a natural guy." -Kermit the Frog "George W. Bush has something in common with the Ming emperors of China: He seems determined to make his great nation less ambitious and more ignorant." -Eugene Robinson, WashingtonPost.com "Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong, and second - and best - in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night's sleep and not being hurt by new shoes." -Theodor Fontane "In fact, just the simple existence of _Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo_ might go a long way toward explaining some of our diplomatic breakdowns overseas, and a few of the things that have gone awry back here at home as well." -Fametracker.com "The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything." -Edward John Phelps "History warns us that when large religious groups start imagining themselves to be oppressed by a pernicious and cunning minority, bad things can happen... In the imaginary world painted by the leaders of 'Justice Sunday II,' conservative Christian Republicans may control the White House, the Congress, and several seats on the Supreme Court, but they remain oppressed and victimized." -Ron Garver, CBSNews.com "There's this overwhelming sense being a patient [in a hospital] of having no boundaries, no privacy, no control over anything, and you feel so awful you can't do anything about it." -Sandra Ramundt, NYTimes.com "To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment." -George Edward Woodberry "The very pursuits that make some Americans happy (some very happy indeed) are considered downright sinful by social conservatives. By itself, this attitude wouldn't be a problem if these other Americans were content to avoid activities they regard as sinful, live their lives according to their convictions, and recognize the rights of their fellow Americans to do the same." -Dan Savage, _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ "No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side." -Jascha Heifetz "Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it." -Kenneth Bancroft Clark "In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising." -Richard Posner, NYTimes.com "Love is purely a creation of the human imagination... the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits." -Katherine Anne Porter "No virtuous man has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading." -H. L. Mencken "New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." -John Locke "My own belief is that the universe exists as a miracle and that we have been born here to witness and celebrate. We wonder at our purpose for living. Our purpose is to perceive the fantastic. Why have a universe if there is no audience?" -Ray Bradbury "Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do." -Jose Ortega Y Gasset "In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses." -Heinrich Heine "I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me." -Dave Barry "All youth is bound to be 'misspent;' there is something in its very nature that makes it so, and that is why all men regret it." -Thomas Wolfe "Government is too big and important to be left to the politicians." -Chester Bowles "Scarlett Johansson's Fame Audit: It's the classic Hollywood fable. You co-star in a beloved indie. Then you star in a breakout indie. Then you have sex with Benicio Del Toro in an elevator. Enter Michael Bay." -Fametracker.com "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." -Ernest Hemingway "He was sick of it all, all the injustice and the way the world is going about it. Why, for example, don't they ever take a moment of silence for all the Iraqi kids who die?" -Sanjay Dutt, a friend of one of the British suicide bombers, 7/15/05 "A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words." -Edmund Burke "A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy." -Joseph Campbell "The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." _The Screwtape Letters,_ by C. S. Lewis "Way to work the episode title into the second line of dialogue this week, Clark. Bravo." -TelevisionWithoutPity.com, on Smallville "I never liked the middle ground - the most boring place in the world." -Louise Nevelson "I think it is all right for one ambassador to come and push, but an ambassador always has to remember that there are 190 others who will have to be convinced - or a vast majority of them - for action to take place." -Kofi Annan, 8/1/05 "Civilization in itself is a long hard fight to maintain and advance." -Thornton Wilder "So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press." -Richard Posner, NYTimes.com
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
Back to Quote-O-Rama HQ
Back to my home page