Quote-o-rama:
The Seventeenth Miscellaneous File
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -Plato "The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were." -David Brinkley "The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made." -Ralph Waldo Emerson "But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me." -Mark Twain "In case you're worried about what's going to become of the younger generation, it's going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation." -Roger Allen "The saddest thing is that it runs the risk of making vampires not scary. I will be glad when the glut is over. Maybe they will be scary again. I like my creatures of the night a little nocturnal." -Neil Gaiman, 2010 "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." -Sidney J. Harris "It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." -H. L. Mencken "Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it." -John Adams, 1776 "I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first." _Kidnapped_, by Robert Louis Stevenson "Criminals do not die by the hands of the law; they die by the hands of other men." -George Bernard Shaw "One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp." —Ed Wood "Those of us who experienced Jami Gertz as Star in _The Lost Boys_ during our formative years seriously considered the merits of a life of vampirism, and on occasion, still do, the Frog brothers be damned." -Joe Donatelli, mademan.com "All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse." -Benjamin Franklin "No one can earn a million dollars honestly." -William Jennings Bryan "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -Stephen Roberts "The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams - but it never builds." -Herbert Hoover "By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong." -Charles Wadsworth "A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life." -Jorge Luis Borges "Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." -Alan Moore "All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken." -Thomas Wolfe "My pride in how far our society has come is largely facetious, as we still hunt down women's healthcare providers, homosexuals, atheists, etc. We have replaced torch-bearing mobs with Fox News, but you can't really call that progress." -Dan Piraro "As far as I'm concerned - if a team of people have to give you a list of things to stop doing so you don't appear to be an arrogant asshole then you, my kind sir, are an arrogant asshole. There really are no two ways around it." -EvilBeetGossip.com "Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last." -C.S. Lewis, October 1963 "I have seen the future and it doesn't work." -Robert Fulford "The life most pleasing to God, is that which is spent in most usefulness to our fellow-creatures. A man cannot love his God, and hate his brother: he cannot expect mercy, who shows none." -S. M. M'Corkle "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed." -Carl Jung "I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating." -Sophocles "It is remarkable how far we've come as a society, however. Just a couple of hundred years ago mobs of torch-bearing villagers hunted down mutants and murdered them out of fear. Now we dress them up in flashy jerseys and award them with multi-million dollar paychecks for slamming into others of their kind. It makes a human proud." -Dan Piraro "Confusion is always the most honest response." -Marty Indik "An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry." -Thomas Jefferson "He wanted to be a fairy tale and he got to be one... but you can't be a fairy tale when you're alive... and everything is easier to forgive when it's over." _Cat and Girl_, 2009 "As a feature film director you got to be a guarding dog of the whole production. You got to be able to hold 100 script pages in the head at the same time. If you miss a detail it's wasted." -Spike Jonze "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." -Nelson Mandela "The best way to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." -Charles Austin Beard "Parents need to do something they've never been required to to before perhaps at anytime in history: deliberately and consciously counter many of the dominant messages of our own culture." -Kay Hymowitz "Ed Wood tried to succeed by mainstream standards and failed - but he developed an incompetence so individual that we celebrate it today." -CatAndGirl.com "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." -Bertrand Russell "I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul." -J. G. Ballard, 1982 "Another PR conundrum is that the Old Testament says Jews are the 'chosen people.' If 'He' created all of the myriad types, groups, ethnicities, and nationalities of people on earth, why choose any one specific group to be your favorite? Seems unfair and a bit contradictory." -Dan Piraro "You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty." -Cecil Baxter "...So listen up, boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the *second* worst thing that happens to you today." -"Meet the Spy," Team Fortress 2 "I'm not the least bit self-conscious. I'm the guy who went to the Tokyo Dome and sold out five nights. Who's the other rapper who sold out five nights at the Tokyo Dome? Oh, that's right, there isn't one. You don't have to add anything to my resume, just read it like it is." -MC Hammer, 2009 "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Teddy Roosevelt "Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power." -Eric Hoffer "The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." -Albert Einstein "Somebody told me you can take any cartoon from The New Yorker and substiute the caption 'Why are you such an asshole?' for whatever caption they have and it almost always works and is often funnier than the real caption." -Pete Von Sholly "Something that people often don't understand about comedians is they are the angriest people on Earth. It's either telling jokes or taking hostages." -billmon.org "There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously." -Thomas Sowell "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." -Charles Kuralt "The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene." Hannah Arendt, 1972 "In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and even clothes and handbags, the discussion of fur is childish." -Karl Lagerfeld, 2008 "You can't ask a guy like me why. I really wanted to fly through the air. I was a daredevil, a performer. I loved the thrill, the money, the whole macho thing. All those things made me Evel Knievel. Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an asshole not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death." -Evel Knievel, 2007 "Between the dogs and the wolf, I shall always side with the wolf, especially when he is wounded." -Jacques Verges "It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." -Isaac Asimov, 1978 "He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities." -Robertson Davies "Many people make secrets in order to have secrets to tell" -H.G. Wells, 1920 "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." -Henri Louis Bergeson "We talk a great deal about patriotism. What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power - to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. The dedication of a lifetime - these are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them." -Adlai Stevenson, 1952
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
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