Some favorite quotes
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-Franklin P. Adams
A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.
- Henry Adams
Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.
- Joey Adams
Great is the guilt of the unnecessary war.
- John Adams
I disclaim all patriotism as incompatible with the principles of eternal justice.
- John Quincy Adams
Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
- Mike Adams
You cannot insure success, but you can deserve it.
- Joseph Addison
Anyone can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
- George Ade
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Adler
It is in the nature of men to trample on the fighter once he is down.
Neither anarchy nor tyranny; worship the mean.
- Aeschylus
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
If a problem is too difficult to solve, one cannot claim that it is solved by pointing at all the efforts made to solve it.
- Hannes Alfvern
Never play cards with a man named Doc, never eat at a place named Mom's and never go to bed with anyone who has more troubles than you do.
- Nelson Algren
He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.
My editor gets 10% of whatever I get except my blinding headaches
- Fred Allen
Comedy is tragedy plus time.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
I plan to run though the Valley of Death.
I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy next to me.
I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead; not sick, not wounded; dead.
Intellectuals are like the Mafia, they only kill their own.
Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
The question is not, 'How could this happen?' but 'Why doesn't this happen more often?'
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
- Woody Allen
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
- Henri Frederic Amiel
I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.
- Natalie Angier
Wit is educated insolence.
- Aristotle
In flying the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.
- Neil Armstrong
You carry a little pad of paper in your pocket, don't you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought of it the other day. Let's take decay. Now what is decay? It's fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that? Of course not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street there--they're all on fire. They're burning up. Decay, you see, is always going on. It doesn't stop. Water and paint can't stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That's fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up.
- Sherwood Anderson
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but "That's funny...".
- Isaac Asimov
I wish I knew as much about anything as that young man knows about everything.
- Asquith (on the young Churchill)
Nobody ever did anything that wasn't a verb.
- Athayde
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
You shall love your crooked neighbor. With your crooked heart.
- W H Auden
As quick as boiled asparagus.
A radish may know no Greek but I do.
- Augustus
Vanity, working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
If it be true that no young lady can ever be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of, and of slighting those performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them.
Man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown.
To torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.
In justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire more in woman than ignorance.
To be always firm is to be often obstinate.
Take my word for it, if you are in too great a hurry, you will certainly live to repent it.
It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.
- Jane Austen
The Cowboy Code
1. A cowboy never takes unfair advantage -- even of an enemy.
2. A cowboy never betrays a trust.
3. A cowboy always tells the truth.
4. A cowboy is kind to small children, to old folks, and to animals.
5. A cowboy is free from racial and religious prejudice.
6. A cowboy is helpful and when anyone is in trouble, he lends a hand.
7. A cowboy is a good worker.
8. A cowboy is clean about his person and in thought, word, and deed.
9. A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents, and the laws of his country.
10. A cowboy is a patriot.
- Gene Autry
No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
- Isaac Babel
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
- Francis Bacon
Nothing about me surprises me.
- Honore de Balzac
My father warned me about men and liquor but he never said a word about women and cocaine.
The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.
- Tallulah Bankhead
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.
You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever. Well, who gives a shit.
- Dave Barry
More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much.
- P. T. Barnum
Like Kafka's Hunger Artist, he was the sole satisfied spectator of his own creation.
- John Barth
Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
- Joseph Barth
The discovery and its explanation occupied me for a long time, so that I neglected other things for it; I recognized that I had come upon a fundamental question.
- Erasmus Bartholin
Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
- Arthur Baer
All new ideas pass through three stages: first they are dismissed as nonsense, then they are rejected as being against religion and finally they are acknowledged as the truth, with the proviso from the initial opponents that they knew it all along.
- Karl Ernst von Baer
Figaro qua! Figaro la! Figaro su! Figaro giu! (Figaro here! Figaro there! Figaro up! Figaro down!)
- Beaumarchais
Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflection, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot.
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.
There is no lack of void.
When I'm asked how long I've been here, I answer "A second." ........ Or "A day." ........ Or "A century." It all depends on what I mean by "here" ........and "me" ........and "been."
Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything.
That's the way I am - either I forget something immediately or I never forget it.
- Samuel Beckett
Music is a mediator between spiritual and sensual life.
- Ludwig Van Beethoven
A critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He's right there every night. He sees it done every night. He sees how it should be done every night. But he cannot do it himself.
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
- Brendan Behan
A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is, "Don't you wish you knew?" and a pretty good answer it is too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question.
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.
Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't.
Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
Does the average man get enough sleep? What is enough sleep? What is the average man? What is does?
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.
Every man owes it to himself (and to his friends) to get away entirely alone in an isolated shack every so often, if only to find out just what bad company he can be.
I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists.
I can't bring myself to say, 'Well, I guess I'll be toddling along.' It isn't that I can't toddle. It's just that I can't 'guess I'll toddle.'
I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.
I find that, while working, a pipe is a great source of inspiration. A pipe can be placed diagonally across the keys of a typewriter so that they will not function, or it can be made to give out such a cloud of smoke that I cannot see the paper.
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Just think of all the things you can do after 40! Professor Webster was 57 when he cut up Dr. Parkman and threw him into the furnace of the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Parkman was 70 himself!
One of the easiest forms of pretense to break down is the pretense of enthusiasm for exotic foods. Just bring on the exotic foods.
Sand is also a good place on which to write, "I love you," as it would be difficult to get into court after several years have passed.
Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
The work can wait, I said, quoting our business motto.
There are various forms of the disease, the victim of which is unable to say "No." Some of these forms are more serious than others, and often lead to electrocution or marriage.
There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.
When I was a child I was of an affectionate disposition, but not enough to get arrested.
Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
- Robert Benchley
Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all.
-Bill Bennett
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
- Ingrid Bergman
A man may be hot but he's not when he's shot 'cause you can't get a man with a gun.
- Irving Berlin
Bach is Bach just as God is God.
- Hector Berlioz
A critic is a virgin who would teach Don Juan how to make love.
- Tristan Bernard
There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred.
- Bhagavat
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. [Ecclesiastes 7:4]
- Bible
Here's to woman! Would that we could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.
- Ambrose Bierce
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
- Josh Billings
The supreme geopolitical fact of the modern era is that Americans speak English.
- Otto von Bismarck
All great events begin with the pulsation of an artery.
- William Blake
Weather! This isn't weather! This is divine vengeance!
I got my shit together and found I couldn't lift it.
- Roy Blount, Jr.
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words do permanent damage.
When things aren't going well, it's easier to blame someone else.
There is nothing more boring than people who love you.
- Eric Bogosian
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.
We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?
- Niels Bohr
When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.
- James H. Boren
If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
- Max Born
I spent half my life grasping a baseball only to find out it was the other way around.
- R. Boulton
The first time a man goes into battle is like the first time a man makes love to a woman: the anticipation is overpowering; the ignorance is obstructive; the fear of disgrace is consuming and survival is triumphant.
- Ben Bradlee
It's fun to be the sucker - if you can afford it.
- 'Diamond Jim' Brady
Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral.
Mrs. Peachum: Money talks. Mr. Peachum: Not too much, I hope.
First whore: Plain linen puts men off. Second whore: Naah, plain linen makes 'em feel at home.
Terrible is the temptation to do good.
- Bertholt Brecht
I may be a bad woman, but I'm awfully good company.
- Fanny Brice
How I wish I could enumerate pi easily, since all these (censored) mnemonics prevent recalling any of pi's sequences more simply. [number of letters in each word give first digits of pi]
- Peter Brigham
By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.
Try to relax and enjoy the crisis.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
- Mel Brooks
The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum and light but the shadow of God
- Sir Thomas Browne
The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
- Bill Bryson
To every man is given the key to the gate of heaven; the same key opens the gate of hell.
- Buddhist proverb
The stock exchange closes on Saturdays and Sundays and I don't break out in hives.
If you're in a poker game for thirty minutes and don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
If you don't know jewelry, know your jeweler.
If you don't want to tap dance, you're in the wrong business.
It is difficult to teach a new dog old tricks.
To expect big prizes for small investments is to encourage stupid behavior.
- Warren Buffett
Heredity is nothing but stored environment.
- Luther Burbank
The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and goodwill would wish, five and ten years hence, had been done.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke
The deities that I adore are social peace and plenty.
Some have meat and cannot eat, some cannot eat that want it. But we have meat and we can eat, so let the Lord be thanked.
- Robert Burns
Once your reputation is shot you can get away with quite a lot.
- Wilhelm Busch
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
- Nicholas Murray Butler
I'm telling the truth as God himself would tell it if he could only talk.
- Erskine Caldwell
If a computer is a god, it is an Old Testament god with lots of rules and no mercy.
Let us worship Zarathustra, just the way we useta. I'm a Zarathustra boosta and he's good enough for me.
Let us worship Aphrodite. She's beautiful but flighty. She doesn't wear a nightie, but she's good enough for me.
- Joseph Campbell
Love can burn or love can last but not both.
There is no defense against scorn.
- Camus
You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
- Al Capone
Bourbon to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara.
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
- Truman Capote
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
- Dale Carnegie
They are the omelet makers and we are the eggs.
- Jon Carroll
"Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
The rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.
- Lewis Carroll
When it comes to a wife, give me a woman everytime.
- Joyce Cary
Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with necessity.
- Thomas Caryle
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
- Cato
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
- Dick Cavett
Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.
Even among galley slaves ten percent were volunteers.
The beginning of the end begins with the loss of the sense of proportion.
- Celine
The majority of those who put together collections of verses or epigrams resemble those who eat cherries or oysters; they begin by choosing the best and end by eating everything.
- Chamfort
LA doesn't have the heart of a paper cup.
She was a blond who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
LA is a mail order city. Everything you can get in the catalog you can get better somewhere else.
They knocked over tombs and sneered at the dead. Which is only as it should be. [on new generation]
I could have so easily become everything the world has no use for.
To live in a place you must either love it or hate it or do both by turns, as you do with a woman.
- Raymond Chandler
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
- William Ellery Channing
In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
- Cesar Chavez
What nedeth it to sermone of it moore?
- Chaucer
A woman of forty whose fine skin and clear features could be counted among her organizational gifts.
...the essence of her beauty was disenchantment.
...it looked as if it had been put together by old ladies and mice.
...where people drank their gin surrounded by the relics of an arduous and orderly way of life of which they knew nothing.
All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and shells and alchemist's gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore water green and purple further out and the joy of distances, all these are hers.
- John Cheever
Anyone watching us would thing that we were not traveling but going insane! [during a particularly difficult trip through Siberia]
To be in continual ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination.
- Chekhov
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
- Lord Chesterfield
When one man finds the way, his chickens and dogs ascend to heaven.
Eight immortals cross the sea; each shows a saintly passage.
The sky is high; the emperor is far away.
When you mention Cao Cao, he soon arrives.
Never pull on your shoes in a melon patch; never adjust your cap under a plum tree.
Lord Jiang casts a line, a fish wants to be caught.
- Chinese proverbs
The more you don't do it, the more fun it is to read about it.
- C. Churchill
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals
It's a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
The truth deserves a bodyguard of lies.
- Winston Churchill
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
- John Ciardi
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
- Cicero
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
- Arthur C. Clarke
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy
There is a connection between neurosis and talent but there is also a connection between genius and mental illness.
- John Cleese
I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am forever shocking.
- Jean Cocteau
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
- Charles Caleb Colton
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
- Confucius
Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.
- Jimmy Connors
It was blackness without a single gleam.
It was solemn, and a little ridiculous, too, these struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of his moral identity.
A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness but has been of no advantage to me, I can assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen.
...and forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds.
The onlookers see most of the game.
All those things which had made him a master had made him a captive, too.
Every day added a link to the fetters of that strange freedom.
He was one of those brilliantly endowed men who are not dull enough to nurse a success.
His object seemed to awaken the indignant attention of the universe.
His loathsomeness, too, was abject, so that a simply disgusting person would have appeared noble by his side.
Obviously it would be something very simple, the simplest impossibility in the world.
All she knew of the world was a betrayed woman and a sinister pantaloon.
[The letter was full of] easy morality and family news.
- Joseph Conrad
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
- Robert R. Coveyou
It's amazing how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
One should start everyday by asking everyone how they are. It oils the wheels.
The devil is not wise because he is the devil but because he is old.
Down with the head, up with the heart and you're over the top and skimming down the other side like a dragonfly.
- Noel Coward
If the earth and the moon were about to clash, many persons would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the collision.
- Stephen Crane
There is no accounting for laws.
The only person more cynical than a drunk is a reformed drunk.
One of the great things about America is that moral superiority is so damn cheap.
Consideration touches more deeply and longer than passion.
- James Crumley
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
- E. E. Cummings
There is nothing worse than a self made man who worships his own creation.
- Paul Curan
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
Just go ahead and faith will follow. (on calculus)
-d'Alembert
She was so wild that when she made French toast she got her tongue caught in the toaster.
- Rodney Dangerfield
Doubt, no less than knowledge, pleases.
Heaven wheels above you displaying to you her eternal glories and still your eyes are on the ground.
Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold blooded and the sins of the warm blooded on different scales.
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral.
- Dante
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
- Clarence Darrow
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
- Charles Darwin
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
We are only as good as the times we are in.
- David-Weill
Beautiful women should be open handed, parsimony ruins the complexion after a while.
There is no such bitter judge of old friends as a brilliant failure.
He was one of those who thought women were lovely creatures whose sexual coals could be blown into warmth by raunchy academic chit-chat.
Speaking like a man who had come to disturb the sleep of the world.
They looked on uncomprehendingly, like cows at a passing train.
Have faith in your whim.
I know flattery when I hear it but I do not often hear it.
Treat marvels with the seriousness of fact.
His compelling love affair was with himself.
Patronization is not much different from bullying.
The revenge of the unlived life is that suddenly it makes a fool of you.
She had been kissed more often then a police court Bible and by much the same class of people.
If I had the power to cast curses, I should rank the curse of being enviable very high.
The wife of an academic is twice removed from the center of events.
The truth is always an interim judgment.
The evidence of things not seen.
A: Intellect is at harmony with emotion, intelligence integrated through recollected experience, sentiment tempered by fact, desire directed toward world objects and controlled by a sense of humor and proportion. B: I'm glad to hear there is going to be some humor in it.
Canadian religion in its proper place is neither mocked nor heeded.
Academicism runs in the blood like syphilis.
Science is discovery and revelation and that is not art.
Oh the malice of these bony ectomorphs!
A good dinner is one of civilization's triumphs over barbarism.
Never hope to find wisdom in colleges alone. Consult old women
The prevailing Canadian skin color is that of an arrowroot biscuit.
I like my cheese opinionated.
Not eating enough is not necessarily a path to holiness. How many visions of Eternity have been born of low blood sugar?
Many believe science has no history. It is all here and now.
He spoke in a way so as to give Dr. Johnson the jim-jams.
His life is ebbing away and he thinks he can hold it with the brandy of gossip.
The Protestant Prayer is "God forgive me, but for God's sake keep this under your hat."
- Roberston Davies
Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
- Charles G. Dawes
Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.
- Daniel Defoe
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
- Charles de Gaulle
Once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
- Thomas De Quincey
The unexamined life may not be worth living but the examined one is no bed of roses either.
Giocondaphobia: the fear of being smiled at by women.
They preened themselves on their ignorance of those areas of life familiarity with which would stigmatize them as commonplace.
He often saw himself as Christ beating the bejesus out of everyone in sight.
He chewed more than he bit off.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.
- Peter DeVries
Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.
- Thomas Dewar
A look of contempt which might of withered an anchor.
We are going in neck and crop for fashion.
Eat your meat while its warm and comfortable.
Some would say the Good Samaritan was a bad economist.
- Charles Dickens
The left annoys me but the right insults my intelligence.
The interests of big business are not a proxy for morality.
Poor folks can only afford the present tense.
- Debra Dickerson
I tell the truth, but I tell it aslant.
- Emily Dickinson
Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.
- Gordon R. Dickson
We owe most of what we know to about one hundred men. We owe most of what we have suffered to another hundred or so.
- R.W. Dickson
There are those who want books and to obtain their end would turn a human being into printed matter.
- Isak Dinesen
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
- Dirac
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
- Benjamin Disraeli
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
- J. Frank Dobie
Love's mysteries in souls do grow, but the body is his book.
- Donne
If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.
- Dostoyevsky
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A man who had a harp in his throat with a hurricane behind it. [William Jennings Bryan]
He was the living image of a great mind in the midst of a large and gloomy think.
I voted for him when voting for him was the only way of proclaiming to that world that I couldn't pay me room rent.
- Peter Finley Dunne
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
- Will Durant
Engineers treat physics like a pimp treats a whore.
In science nothing is more repugnant than a miracle.
The pauper king of truth...
- Friedrich Durrenmatt
Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.
- Aubrey Eben
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.
- Sir Arthur Eddington
That's the nature of research - you don't know what in hell you're doing.
- Doc Edgerton
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
- Thomas Edison
In poverty, as in physics, the starting conditions are everything.
If you wonder why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their humanity and earn their tips though the covert distribution of fats.
- Barbara Ehrenreich
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
It seems hard to look at God's cards.
Most men revere words they cannot understand and consider a writer whom they can understand to be superficial.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Still there are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
There are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. And I am unsure about the universe.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
This has been done elegantly by Minkowski; but chalk is cheaper than gray matter, and we will do it as it comes.
- Albert Einstein
God is inconceivable, immortality unbelievable but duty is peremptory and absolute.
It is never to late to be what you might have been.
Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.
- George Eliot
What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.
I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker.
It is strange, isn't it/ that a man should have a consuming passion/ to do something for which he lacks the capacity.
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
- T. S. Eliot
It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
- Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
- Havelock Ellis
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.
Never read a book that is not a year old.
Always do what you are afraid to do
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic.
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
The reward for a thing well done is to have done it
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Emerson
It's too soon to tell. [when asked about implications of French revolution]
- Chou Enlai
Good night, dear void.
Could I treat you to a coffee, buy you dinner, take you to a movie until death do us part.
- Nora Ephron
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
- Desiderius Erasmus
There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
- John Erskine
Freedom is the only guardian of freedom.
- Yaron Ezrahi
The unprecedented comes into sudden and explosive contact with the atavistic. (modern civil war)
- Hans Erzenberger
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
- Susan Ertz
A signature always reveals a man's character-and sometimes even his name.
- Evan Esar
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
When asked by a politician what was the good of induced emf's, he replied "What good? Why, Prime Minister, some day you will tax it!"
- Michael Faraday
[During World War I] the Germans fought for territory, the British fought for control of the seas, the French fought for patriotism and the Americans fought for souvenirs.
- Bryon Farwell
Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
- David Fasold
You don't need new stories, you just need a new audience.
- John Henry Faulk
The past is never dead. It is not even past.
- William Faulkner
The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
- Felelon
Faith is the absence of proof.
I believe in me and after that there's room for doubt.
- Jules Feiffer
I am the emperor and I want dumplings.
- Ferdinand I
A general principle of physics is that no matter what a guy thinks, it is almost always wrong.
Accept nature as She is - absurd.
Nobody knows how it can be like that. [on quantum mechanics]
One of the most important tools of physics is the wastebasket.
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.
To understand ice you have to understand things that are themselves very unlike ice.
You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman
Mae West is a plumber's idea of Cleopatra.
Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.
- W. C. Fields
Next time you want to tell someone you love them, say it to yourself and see if you believe it.
Talk is cheap but listenin' will cost ya.
- Harvey Fierstein
Experience is what allows us to repeat our mistakes, only with more finesse!
- Derwood Fincher
Asked his opinion of undergraduates he replied "They recur."
- HAL Fisher
Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't either.
- Joseph Fischer
Taste is the feminine of genius.
- Edward Fitzgerald
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
To be fierce in business, you need to be utterly conventional at home.
- Gustave Flaubert
You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.
- Doug Floyd
It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.
- Errol Flynn
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
- E. M. Forster
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
- Gene Fowler
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread
To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
- Anatole France
We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.
- Francois I
His father kept a slave, who he was married to.
- Johnathan Franzen
Dialogue begins at home.
- Thomas Friedman
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
- Robert Frost
Diligence is the mother of good luck.
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
Well done is better than well said.
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
When passion governs she never governs wisely.
- Ben Franklin
The situation will not be changed by a single act of heroism. We must be aware of the fact that to achieve lasting political and social change and to build a truly self governing and independent society will take many years of hard work. We must become our own hope.
- Wladyslaw Frasynece
All things are difficult before they are easy.
- Thomas Fuller
He who wants to defend everything defends nothing, and he who wants to be everyone's friend has no friends in the end.
-Frederick the Great
All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary [on the outbreak of WWI]
The reason wealth doesn't bring happiness is that money is not an infantile concept.
- Freud
Ever since young men have owned motorcycles incest has been dying out.
- Max Frisch
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
- Erich Fromm
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
The world is full of willing people; some wiling to work, the rest willing to let them.
- Robert Frost
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
There are some ideas so preposterous only the educated can believe in them.
- Paul Fussell
I am the world's only reactionary revolutionary.
Never light a candle carelessly and make sure you know what you are doing when you blow one out.
- Athol Fugard
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
Philosophy is written in that great open book -- I mean the universe -- that forever stands open before our eyes, but you cannot read it until you have first learned to understand the language and recognize the symbols in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics and its symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures without which one does not understand a word, without which one wanders through a dark labyrinth in vain.
- Galileo
Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.
- Ava Gardner
By all means throw up a screen! Sing hymns! Speak verse! Smile sweetly and let a little fart.
- John Gardner
An eye for an eye ends up with the whole world blind.
Anything you do will not make any difference, but it is very important that you do it.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.
Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
- Gandhi
If it ain't broke, fix it to it is.
- Bill Gates
That we can comprehend the little we know already is mindboggling in itself.
- Tom Gates
Ask her to wait a moment -I am almost done.
- Carl Friedrich Gauss, when informed that his wife is dying while he was working
We only part to meet again.
- John Gay
I wouldn't mind dying --it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.
- R. Geis
Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
- David Lloyd George
anspruchsverhalten - a sense of entitlement ('I'm owed this...')
Lastenausgleich - an equalization of burdens
schlapp - a wimp
Truemmerfrauen - women who cleared away rubble after WW II
Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung - coming to grips with Nazi past
Vielschrieber - a scribbler
- German words
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
- Kahlil Gibran
I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.
I am a child of Nature, and take after my mother.
Posterity shall know of me even less than I shall know of posterity.
- William Gilbert
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
- Giraudoux
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
- Malcolm Gladwell
The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.
Too many people keep looking forward to the good old days.
- Arnold Glasow
Relativity eliminated the Galilean illusion of absolute space; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of controllable measurement; chaos eliminated the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.
- James Gleick
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.
- Max Gluckman
Did you ever feel like the whole world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?
- George Gobel
I'm proud of paying taxes. The only thing is - I could be just as proud for half the money.
- Arthur Godfrey
Repeat anything often enough and it becomes the truth.
- Joseph Goebbels
A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss
Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
My friend, all theory is gray and the golden tree of life is green.
The decisions of one heart offer no precedence for another.
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
The rabble fears nothing more than intelligence. But it is stupidity they should fear, if only they understood how fearful it is.
When ideas fail, words come in handy.
- Goethe
The person with the biggest drum doesn't always lead the band.
- Dan Goggin
If you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.
- Robert F. Goheen
Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible.
- Samuel Goldwyn
Are you going to come along quietly or do I have to use ear plugs?
Was I in the war?! I was with the Fourth Armored Deserters!
- The Goon Show
Real men read Montaigne.
Knowledge is hyperbolic: the number of people understanding any subject to a particular depth times that depth is a constant.
Growing up in the suburbs of the '50's I had a childhood that was half Huckleberry Finn and half Studs Lonigan.
- Goth
I love being single; it's almost like being rich.
My notion of an elegant table is you don't leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.
Something in the brain comes alive about 2 AM and it's usually in a chatty mood.
There's a certain class of people who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain.
- Sue Grafton
Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
- Cary Grant
Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money either.
- Robert Graves
A vacation doesn't exist without a life that you are vacationing from.
Original sin was not Adam eating the apple but Adam not eating it slowly enough to really enjoy it.
- Spauling Gray
Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
Middle age is the period of sad caution.
- Graham Greene
German history: humanity, nationality, bestiality.
- Franz Grillparzer
Don't make it too easy for God to find you.
The mind can be fooled in ways the heart can never be.
- Lillian Groag
Figures won't lie, but liars will figure.
- Charles H. Grosvenor
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
- Ernesto "Che" Guevara
You can't have an open mind and an open mouth at the same time.
I hate to make the same mistakes over and over but what else is there?
- Cathy Guisewite
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
- Sacha Guitry
I accommodate every son of a bitch who gets to me.
- Merle Haggard
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
- Alexander Haig
The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
- JBS Haldane
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
- Alex Hamilton
I distrust a man who says "When."
- Dashiell Hammett
I am a man of no convictions - at least I think I am.
- Christopher Hampton
Virtue is its own revenge.
- E Y Harburg
As true as light.
To infuriate the viciously disposed and terrify the mild.
The painting in of the day
He stood as if idiotized.
A mad freak.
A rouge's march or cherubim's warble.
Like a bee and a butterfly in league for life.
Every word cost twice its length in pain.
The brass, wood, catgut and leather band.
To rub salt on a green wound.
It took in the whole circumference of his glance.
- Thomas Hardy
The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
- Lucille S. Harper
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
The only way to understand a woman is to love her - and then it isn't necessary to understand her.
- Sydney Harris
I'll just stay behind with the women and cowards.
The goal of every journey is to explore yourself in new surroundings.
The garden I wish to stroll is a soft, moist hill with a trench of fire.
First at the banquet, last at the brawl.
The bottom half of me is in love.
To Englishmen, life is a topic, not an activity.
Sex is the driving force of most religions. In some, like the Hindu faith, it is overt and in some, like the religion of poor Saint Paul, it is pervert, and in others, like the faith of the great Confucius, it is inert.
It is not your ignorance I detest, it is your ignorance of your ignorance.
The soft chains of the nest.
- William Harrison
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
- Paul Harvey
Brochures never won a war.
Bullshit is infectious.
If the devil does exist then above all he exists within ourselves.
You cannot serve two masters at once and deceive them both at the same time.
- Vaclav Havel
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
- Stephen Hawking
Cut off from the world, with no one to confuse or torture me, I was forced to become original.
- Franz Josef Haydn
The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of; the last he does not concern himself about.
- William Hazlitt
The only difference between a friend and an enemy is five minutes and the right price.
- William Randolph Hearst
bat gol - the daughter of the voice of God
- Hebrew expressions
Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son motier. (God will forgive me. It's his job.)
Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens.
The men of the past had convictions, the men of the present have only opinions.
Woman is at once apple and serpent.
- Heinrich Heine
Don't ever become a pessimist; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun - and neither can stop the march of events.
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship
- Robert A. Heinlein
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Heisenberg
Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.
- H.L.F. von Helmholtz
Never mistake motion for action.
- Ernest Hemingway
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.
- Don Herold
Unfair in practice is not the same thing as wrong in principle, but sometimes it has to do.
- Hendrik Hertzberg
This is no place to be weak, but if you are, keep it to yourself and get the hell out of here as soon as you can.
To feel sorry for yourself, and not just a little bit proud, is a poor combination.
With some dogs you're better off just to let them lie in the sun.
- H Hickam, Jr
Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
- D. J. Hicks
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex -but Congress can.
- Cullen Hightower
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
- Alfred Hitchcock
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
- Bill Hirst
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Transport a German to Kiev and he remains a German. But transport him to Miami, and you make a degenerate out of him - in other words, an American.
- Adolph Hitler
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
- Eric Hoffer
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
- Abbie Hoffman
Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
- Lisa Hoffman
At the heart of the New Deal there was not a philosophy but a temperament.
- Richard Hofstadter
Hell is paved with good Samaritans.
- William M. Holden
I could believe in something, if something believed in me back.
- Michael Holland
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it unfriendly. It is simply indifferent.
- John H. Holmes
The greatest act of faith is when man decides he is not God.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A man should be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
- Homer
The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
- Sidney Hook
There are two kinds of atheists - a tiny group who do not believe in God and a much larger number who live as though God did not exist.
- Richard Hooker
Justice is incidental to law and order.
- J. Edgar Hoover
Those who dance are thought to be mad by those who cannot hear the music.
- G M Hopkins
I have completed a monument more lasting than brass.
Mingle some brief folly with your wisdom.
Now is the time for drinking, now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot.
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
You have played enough; you have eaten and drunk enough. Now it is time for you to depart.
- Horace
A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
- Elbert Hubbard
Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men
Nobody kicks on being interrupted if it's by applause.
When a fellow says it ain't the money but the principle of the thing, it's the money.
- Kin Hubbard
A man's tie should never be louder than his wife.
- John Hughes
[A maze of streets] made by the devil in the image of his fork.
Forty is the old age of youth, fifty the youth of old age.
Without France, the world would be alone.
- Victor Hugo
Hypocrisy is the lubricant of society.
- David Hull
There is a country in Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal.
- Sigfried Hulzer
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
- Hubert H. Humphrey
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
- Robert Hutchins
Eagles may soar in the clouds, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
- Jason Hutchison
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
- Aldous Huxley
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.
The great tragedy of Science -the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
- Thomas Huxley
The empty fisted are always in a rush to gamble.
The pool of fire is not for those who splash about on the surface.
Troll, be thyself and thyself alone.
Hedda: I have a talent for one thing and one thing only. Brockman: What is that? Hedda: Boring myself to death.
- Henrik Ibsen
An aperitif is the foreplay of gastronomy.
- Clifford Irving
Expectation now stood on stilts.
- Washington Irving
acqua in bocca (water in the mouth; mum's the word)
che violino (what a violin; what a toady)
tieni duro (stay hard; stick to your guns)
la tratta a pesci in fascia (he throws fish in her face; he treats her like dirt)
piove sul bagnato (it's never raining on the bathtub; it never rains but it pours)
mi gratto in pancia (I scratch my belly; I'm twiddling my thumbs)
di riffe o di raffe (by raffle or lottery; by hook or by crook)
sta come un papa (he's like a pope; he lives like a king)
- Italian proverbs
You have to have fun while fighting for freedom.
Never advocate despair but to ignore reality is just as destructive.
He was on the outside of enough.
He was on a first name basis with the bottom of the deck.
He was weaker than bus station chili.
- Molly Ivins
That is a subject, which even at this far remove, causes my pulses to slow. [when asked to review a book on the navy's role in the War of 1812]
There are no differences but differences of degree between degrees of difference and no difference. [while on laughing gas]
Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.
- Henry James
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness - then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream.
- William James
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
- Jerome K. Jerome
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
When you tell a fellow to go to hell, you had better make sure you can get him there.
- Lyndon Baines Johnson
A lady came up to me on the street and pointed to my suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too."
I'm originally from Iowa. It took a long time for me to realize we were free to go.
- Jake Johannsen
Whoever surveys the world must see many things that give him pain.
Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.
Let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich.
Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none; the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
- Samuel Johnson
Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.
- Philander Johnson
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
- F.P. Jones
Two American Jews go into a nightclub in Tel Avid to find a comic making cracks in Hebrew to an appreciative audience. One of the Americans breaks into uproarious laughter. The other asks him - as neither speaks Hebrew - why he is laughing. "Why not?" he answers. "I trust these people." That is the essence of science. Even though you may not understand quantum mechanics or the nerve cell membrane, trust those who do. Most scientists are quite ignorant about most sciences but all use a shared grammar that allows them to recognize their craft when they see it.
- Steven Jones
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
- Thomas Jones
But one more invention and my brain would burst.
[to a person with a cold] Breath less...and further off.
Down on your knees and wiggle!
May a horse drag you to the hangman - you and your flies together.
- Ben Jonson
The man who invented weights and measures converted the innocent simplicity in which man had lived into a miserable existence dominated by fraud and deceit.
- Flavius Josephus
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
To teach is to learn twice.
- Joseph Joubert
Luxury is more ruthless than war.
- Juvenal
For DeMille, decadence was people boozing and dancing and watching drag shows. For Bergman, decadence was people doing all that and not enjoying it.
- Pauline Kael
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
- Franz Kafka
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
- Henry Kaiser
I am anorexic for an opera singer but I'm a fat anorexic.
- Kiri Te Kanawa
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- Immanuel Kant
Some times you have to pause a moment to savor the bouquet of so absurd a situation.
Fancies may be as you please but facts are as the Universe pleases.
- Robert Kaplan
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
- Garrison Keillor
I been readin' 'bout how maybe they is planets peopled by folks with advanced brains. On the other hand, maybe we got the most brains... maybe our intellects is the universe's most advanced. Either way, it's a mighty soberin' thought.
- Waklt Kelly ('Pogo')
It is easier to believe than to think.
- James Kemper
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
- John F. Kennedy
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
- John Maynard Keynes
We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
- Jason Kidd
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
- Soren Kierkegaard
When the shooting starts they always send for the sons-of-bitches.
- Adm. Ernest King
I do not discount your talents because of their housing.
...and so on into the trackless wastes of theory.
- Laurie King
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
A gaffe occurs not when somebody lies, but when he says what he really thinks.
- Michael Kingsley
Although the universe is under no obligation to make sense, students in pursuit of a Ph. D. are.
- Robert Kirshner
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
- Henry Kissinger
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
- Jonathan Kozol
It's not what you know that's important. It's not even who you know that's important. It's what you know about who you know that's important.
God's Own Wonder-Working Tonic is an invigorating compound with three potent ingredients: work to be done (keeps the eyes bright and looking at the future), self-respect (keeps the head up, also the corners of your mouth, and makes the past, on the whole, a pleasant place to visit), and lust (keeps important bodily fluids flowing and makes the present thrilling).
- Eric Kraft
In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning.
- H.A. Kramers
God created the integers and the rest is the work of man.
- Leopold Kronecker
Yet surely if there is anything in this world clear and obvious it is the fact that nature has cast us all in the same mold in order that we may behold in one another companions, indeed brothers.
- La Boetie
We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
- François La Rochefoucauld
The middle aged talk about sleep the way frat boys talk about sex. Did you get any last night? Nah, but this weekend, believe me, I'm gonna go all night long.
- Marcus Laffey
Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. [on Byron]
- Lady Caroline Lamb
I'm a Christian, except for the Jesus part.
She lived in fear of ironic endings.
We're all crazy but most of you don't have my style.
Holding on to resentment is like eating rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.
Happiness, sometimes, weighs a bit more.
Ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever.
I am not a religious woman but even I know that if you try a pair of shoes on and say out loud 'Oh God,' you should buy them
The prize, from Menelaus on, has always been the teenage girl.
- Anne Lamott
Comedy is still our least bestial way of admonishing the wreckage of our lives but too much comedy, or nothing but comedy, has a subtle, feline habit of pushing our lives so far away from us that they cease, as if in a dream, to be our responsibility.
He wanted a good life, or, failing that, a quiet life, and he found that it was most readily available between hard covers.
I am not, as far as I can ascertain, a Fascist, except when seated behind the wheel of a car.
- Anthony Lane
It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge.
The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools.
- Doug Larson
Norma loquendi [everyday speaking]
Licentia loquendi [liberty of speaking]
Lex terrai [law of the land]
In flagrante delicto [caught in the act]
Nitor in adversum [struggle in adversity and/or shine in opposition]
Furiosus furore solum punitur [a nut is punished by his own nuttiness]
Interest reipublicae ut sit finis litium [For the public good, let there be an end to contention]
Scribere est agere [to write is to act]
Salvo pudore [decency being observed]
Custos morum [keeper of the morals]
De minimis non curat lex [the law cannot be concerned with trifles]
Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est [two minds without a single thought]
post hoc, ergo propter hoc [after it, therefore because of it]
- Latin phrases
Morality is in the method.
When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed by madmen but by experts and bureaucrats.
There is one thing worse than change and that is the status quo.
- John Le Carre
People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.
- Robert Keith Leavitt
In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
There are so many alcolholic writers because if you have to be face to face with yourself, it is best if one of you is drunk.
- Fran Lebowitz
This is one thing worse than change and that is the status quo.
- John LeCarre
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business.
- Michael Ledeen
Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
- Leon Lederman
Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
I wish people who have trouble communicating would shut up.
- Tom Lehrer
This world may be a phantasm and existence merely a dream, but this dream or phantasm to me is real enough in that by using reason well, we are never deceived by it.
- Leibniz
There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure.
- Jack E. Leonard
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.
-Aldo Leoplold
Election Day has become so commercialized that people forget it is about Jesus.
- David Letterman
Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll find it.
- Sam Levenson
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
- Aaron Levenstein
Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
- Bernard Levin
No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. Mens sano in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms.
- A J Liebling
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it is best to let him run.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
- Lincoln
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
- Walter Lippmann
Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
- Jon Lithgow
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
- John Locke
Who earned your income? Your father. You stand on dead man's legs.
Their method was one of assertion, assumption and denunciation. [on those who argue about something about which they know nothing]
Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eat life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.
If I was the President of the United States tomorrer, 'ow would it fill my belly for one time w'en I was a kiddy and it went empty?
The value of a life is what that life puts upon itself.
It is the life within you that makes the rating.
With immortality before me I might elevate my soul to all sorts of altitudes.
All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful, but I knew it would work and I felt myself a man of power as I looked at it.
God is noddin' and not doing his duty, though it's me as shouldn't say it.
The lines of his life were cast in different places.
- Jack London
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.
- Konrad Lorenz
The average person thinks he isn't.
- Father Larry Lorenzoni
It's just the news; it's not real.
The past is something we wake up to.
- Craig Lucas
It's no disgrace to be old. But damn if it isn't inconvenient.
- Moms Mabley
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there.
- Clare Boothe Luce
If boyhood questions aren't answered before a certain point in time, they can't ever be raised again.
[on despised brothers-in-law] It's no pleasure to see your wife's face on somebody you don't like.
Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
I don't care much for taking instructions, even from myself.
You can love completely without understanding completely.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
I suppose that an early stage in coming to hate someone is just running out of things to talk about.
When exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change your socks.
Life every now and then becomes literature.
He was noted for playing poker as if he breathed through gills.
Sometimes death has no meaning to men if they can lie down and sleep.
In the struggle between instincts, it's hard to know whether miserliness or greed will have the edge.
A good working definition of a 'Forest Service mile' is quite a way plus a mile and two-tenths.
In a modern tragedy you have to watch out for little details rather than big flaws.
After women comes overtime.
The first and last question of life is 'How did it happen?"
- Norman Maclean
Perhaps it is better to have a place to go to that you hate than to have no place at all.
Deep respect is not far removed from fear.
- Alistair MacLeod
These people [Freud and other psychoanalysts] want to use the vagina as a telescope through which to view the world. That is not its natural function; it is too narrow.
- Ernst Mach
Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things
-Niccolo Machiavelli
Speak to me and you'll move me; write to me and I'll have to think about it.
Words are gates and fences.
- Robert MacNeil
Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible -or even sinful -that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!
- Dr. Paul MacCready Jr.
Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.
- Horace Mann
She: I know what men want. He: And that is? She: Men want a woman who looks like a boy. Men want a woman who they can protect but who definitely is a survivor. And men want a woman who comes like a train. But with elegance.
Thank God life ends because we could never survive it.
- Patrick Marber
I wish to goodness my life were not always a circle. I wish I were not always resting beneath the umbrella of my own personality.
- John P. Marquand
A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
- Don Marquis
Chico: You can't take it with you. Groucho: Well, I'm sure the hell not going to leave it lying around here.
Chico: I've lost my head over her. Groucho: Well, put you hat on your neck and let's get out of here.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.
Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
- Marx Brothers
I've finally figured out what 'all deliberate speed' means. It means 'slow.'
- Thurgood Marshall
There are flowers everywhere for those who want to look.
- Matisse
To what purpose is this waste? [26:8]
- Matthew
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
- W. Somerset Maugham
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
- Andre Maurois
For the sake of persons of ... different types, scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific, whether it appears in the robust form and the vivid coloring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolic expression.
- James Clerk Maxwell
To be able to do in your mind what is probably not a good idea to do in actuality is a convenience not always appreciated.
- W Maxwell
I like a moral problem so much better than a real problem.
- Elaine May
The English kill their meat twice: once when they slaughter it and once when they cook it.
- Peter Mayle
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
- William G. McAdoo
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.
- Peter McArthur
There are some things you can do only once and you might as well do them that once.
Aarh, for God's sake, don't you have your health and your shoes and a fine head o' hair and what more do you want?
After a full belly, all is poetry.
- Frank McCourt
Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.
- Dan McKinnon
I'm glad I ain't scared to be lazy.
I'm not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age.
- Larry McMurty
The Scylla of too much too soon and the Charbdys of too little too late.
- William McNeil
They would rather defy nature than live without it.
In Los Angeles a long time resident born in Iowa or Lebanon is something like a royal palm. Neither is a native and both are common
- John McPhee
Don't be so humble, you're not that great.
- Golda Meir
A good laugh is a mighty good thing.
A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
The dark, damp November of my soul.
It is better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Our Father, chiefly known to us by thy rod...(part of prayer in Moby Dick)
In him courage was not a sentiment but a thing simply useful to him.
Meditation and water are wedded forever.
- Herman Melville
It is composed and ready, nothing remains to be done save to add the verses. [on being asked if he had completed a play]
The schools of hard knocks has an accelerated curriculum.
- Menander
A Catholic woman may now resort to mathematics to avoid pregnancy, though she is still forbidden to use physics or chemistry.
A man always remembers his first girl with special fondness and then he sort of bunches them.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
The only praise worth a damn is from someone who works at the same bench.
He had the ideals of a floorwalker.
One good horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms.
Wherever I sit is the head of the table.
- H L Mencken
I'm a lousy writer but then a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.
- Grace Metalious
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
- John Stuart Mill
Black people think I'm physically deficient and oppressive; gay people think I'm latently homosexual and overtly macho; women think I'm authoritarian and horny; Asian people think I'm lazy and stupid. Hey you think you've got an axe to grind - I'm fuckin' Paul Bunyan over here!
- Dennis Miller
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
- A. A. Milne
Money can't buy friends, but you get a better class of enemy.
- Spike Milligan
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
- Wilson Mizner
Just when I think it can't get any worse, you become jealous of the Universe.
When I look at myself there seems no reason to be less than pleased.
I'll punish her by loving you.
- Moliere
Sinning in silence is no sin at all.
The envious may die but envy, never.
Make sure you are well installed at court before preaching withdrawal from the world.
Between the great things we cannot do, and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.
- Adolph Monod
There may be no blame but there will be thoughts. And for thoughts there is gin.
When you are very tired even the moment of triumph seems no more than part of the same bad dream.
- Nicholas Monsarrat
Strong memory is usually coupled with infirm judgment.
His motto: "Que scais je?" [What do I know?]
Care should be taken to select a guide whose head is sound rather than full.
Those who undertake to direct several minds of diverse measure and structure with the same lessons find only two or three who produce sound fruit.
Sift everything and lodge nothing on trust.
None but the fool is sure and determined.
He who follows another finds nothing.
No one makes a public accounting of his receipts, all of their profits.
To know by heart is not to know.
All that presents itself to our eyes serves as a book to learn from.
It is a discourteous unmannerliness to do battle with everything that is not of our liking.
Above all, surrender and lay down your arms to the truth.
Even the weaknesses and follies of other men can be instructive.
You speak of what should be spoken but you speak not how you should speak it.
When the vines freeze in my village, my priest argues therefrom the wrath of God against the human race.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness.
Philosophy has teachings for men at their birth as well as in their decrepitude.
It is not the time now for what I can do; and I can not do that for which it is the time.
There is a great difference between a man who does not wish to sin and one who does not know how.
The true mirror of our thought is the course of our lives.
What this man has said, I will do.
Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozen.
Why did I love her? I feel it cannot be explained in anyway but to say because it was she, because it was I.
Custom is a violent and deceiving school mistress.
My reason is not trained to stoop, my knees are.
- Montaigne
If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.
- Montesquieu
A: I never knew Schopenhauer was a philosopher. B: Oh yes, he's the one who begins with an S.
Prophet: "You are all individuals!" Crowd: "We are all individuals!"Prophet: "You are all different!" Crowd: "We are all different!" One voice: "I'm not.."
He was a randy little bugger. Up and down like the Assyrian empire.
- Monty Python
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.
- Hannah More
A man has two reasons for doing the things he does: a good reason and the real reason.
- J P Morgan
Love is not a gift, it is a diploma.
- Tone Morrison
There are two kinds of people - those who want to be some one and those who want to do something.
We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions.
- Dwight Morrow
When you've been troubled by a wasp, don't you love a fly.
- John Mortimer
It is much easier for a stranger to be nice than for a mother who has to listen to her boy's boast that he's a man while she's washing the shit out of his drawers.
- Walter Mosley
Hello? . . ah . . I can't hear too well . . do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? . . oh-ho, that's much better . . .yeah . . huh . . yes . . fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri . . .clear and plain and coming through fine . . .I'm coming through fine, too, eh? . . good, then . . well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine . . .good . . .well, it's good that you're fine and . . and I'm fine . . .I agree with you, it's great to be fine . . .a-ha-ha-ha-ha . . now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb . . .the Bomb, Dmitri . . .the Hydrogen Bomb! . . well now, what happened is . . ah . . one of our base commanders, he had a sort of . . well, he went a little funny in the head . . you know . . just a little . . funny . and, ah . . he went and did a silly thing . . .well, I'll tell you what he did . he ordered his planes . . to attack your country . .ah . .well, let me finish, Dmitri . . .let me finish, Dmitri . . .well listen, how do you think I feel about it?! . . can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? . . why do you think I'm calling you? just to say hello? . . of course I like to speak to you! . . of course I like to say hello! . . not now, but anytime, Dmitri .I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened . .it's a friendly call .of course it's a friendly call . . .listen, if it wasn't friendly . . you probably wouldn't have even got it . . .they will not reach their targets for at least another hour . . .I am . . I am positive, Dmitri . . .listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador . . it is not a trick . . .well, I'll tell you .we'd like to give your air staff a complete run-down on the targets, the flight plans, and the defensive systems of the planes . . .yes! I mean i-i-i-if we're unable to recall the planes, then . . I'd say that, ah . . well, ah . . we're just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri . . .I know they're our boys . . .all right, well listen now .who should we call? . . who should we call, Dmitri? the . . wha-whe, the people . .you, sorry, you faded away there . . .the People's Central Air Defense Headquarters . . .where is that, Dmitri? . . in Omsk . . .right . . .yes . . .oh, you'll call them first, will you? . . uh-huh . . listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? . . whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk information . . .ah-ah-eh-uhm-hm . . I'm sorry, too, Dmitri . . .I'm very sorry . . .all right, you're sorrier than I am, but I am as sorry as well . . .I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri! don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are . . .so we're both sorry, all right?! . . all right.
- Muffley, last president of the United State
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
- John Muir
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.
- H. H. Munro
How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
- Alfred de Musset
Glory is fleeting but obscurity lasts forever.
If I must have an opponent, let it be a coalition.
- Napoleon
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
- George Jean Nathan
The enemy is not conservatism, the enemy is not liberalism. The enemy is bullshit.
- Lars-Erik Nelson
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
- John von Neumann
He who ne'er learns his ABC's forever will a blockhead be.
- The New England Primer
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
- Isaac Newton
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.
- Kimon Nicolaides
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
Plato was a bore.
Without music life would be a mistake.
You have risen from worm to man and much in you is still worm.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
How can I lose to such an idiot?
- Chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich
When he attempted to climb the scalding hot chain, mob leaders cut off his fingers.
He was shot through the eyes, ears, mouth and torso. His hand was pierced with bullets as he attempted to protect his genetalia where he was shot at very close range.
- No Sanctuary (captions to photos in an exhibit about lynching)
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
- Flannery O'Connor
Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
- Catherine O'Hara
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
- Aristotle Onassis
I am a sociologist, God help me.
- John O'Neill
I was born condemned to see both sides of the question.
No automobile but something run over me. I must have been myself, I guess.
The only way to stop is to stop.
You had better look what you call because in the end it comes to you.
- Eugene O'Neill
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
Tea is where we explain to each other what we don't understand.
- Robert Oppenheimer
Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the 500 most wealthy men in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.
- Robert Orben
Now I, even I, would celebrate in rhymes unrapt the great immortal Syracusan, rivaled nevermore, who in his wondrous lore passed on before, left men his guidance how to circles mensurate. [number of letters in each word in sequence is the value of pi]
- A C Orr
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
- George Orwell
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Time makes more converts than reason.
In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.
- Thomas Paine
Socialism - is democratic politically [free speech, right to vote freedom of press, freedom of trade unions], democratic socially [unemployment and health benefits] and democratic economically [people power in factory, economic planning, no profit motive]. It practices Solidarity by developing a sense of community. It is international in that it holds the same goals worldwide.
Communism practices the dictatorship of the proletariat, which means dictatorship, proletarian internationalism, which means the dominance of the Soviet Union in international affairs, and democratic centralism, which means decisions are made by an elitist party construction.
- Olaf Palme
Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.
- Samuel Palmer
What he did well, none did better. What he did poorly, none did worse.
- Artaud Palomino [on El Greco]
Alter uis non sit, qui suus esse potest [Be not another's if thou canst be thyself]
- Paracelsus
The special responsibility of scientists is to inform the world of its choices.
- Robert Park
Oh, life is a glorious circle of song,/ A medley of extemporania;/ And love is a thing that can never go wrong;/ And I am Marie of Rumania.
- Dorothy Parker
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Ellen Parr
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
- Jack Parr
It's amazing how healing money can be.
It takes a lot of money to make a person look this cheap.
What most people don't realize is that I also have a great ass.
- Dolly Parton
By space, the universe encompasses and swallows me as a particle; by thought, I encompass it.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
- Pascal
An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
- John H. Patterson
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
- General George S. Patton
If a person wants to be atheistic it's his God-given right to be an atheist.
- Michael Patton
I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
- John Peel
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
- Alan J. Perlis
[On Groucho Marx] He was treacherous to a degree that would make Machiavelli absolutely kneel at his feet.
- S J Perlman
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
- Laurence J. Peter
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
- Eden Phillpotts
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
- Max Planck
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
- Edgar Allen Poe
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
- Roman Polanski
There is nothing as funny as a rich man's joke.
- Polish proverb
There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.
- Georges Pompidou
Theories, and their protagonists, belong to two entirely different worlds.
- Karl Popper
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
- Antonio Porchia
It's easy to go to extremes, hard to stand firm in the middle.
- Ezra Pound
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
- John Powell
A backslider he could handle, it was the old story, but a red-hot believer, especially a talkative one, could be a devilish nuisance. This kind might be driven away only by prayer and fasting, and he was not adept at either.
He suddenly found himself on the precipice of utility.
- J F Powers
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
- Elvis Presley
They talk most who have the least to say.
- Mathew Prior
One of a hostess's duties is to act as a procuress.
- Marcel Proust
If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
- Emerson Pugh
A fool is a man with bells on his tunic who you can hear coming a mile off and when he arrives has nothing to beat you with but a balloon.
A fact is a rumor with hindsight.
A settlement is to its partner as mortar is to bricks - it not only keeps them together; it also keeps them apart.
- J Pulman
It's very bad when grandma marries a crook, but it is even worse when she divorces the crook.
- Punjabi saying
His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were now no longer at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
Who ever claims truth, truth abandons.
-T Pynchon
I owe much; I have little; the rest I leave to the poor.
The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world.
- Rabelais
There are two kinds of physicists: one kind turned to physics because in early life they had trouble with their radio kits; the other kind became physicists because they had trouble with their God.
To study physics is to be on the trail of the champ.
Who ordered that? (on the discovery of the muon)
- I. I. Rabi
I loved her too much not to detest her now.
Is to return unceasingly to you, while vowing always never to return
My revenge is lost unless he knows it is I who strike him down.
..slavish passion's plaything
What cannot friendship led by love achieve!
You love; that is enough.
- Racine
I'll give you my kidney if you need it but I won't necessarily return your phone calls.
Pander to something you believe in.
- Harold Ramis
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.
- John Raper
A patriot is one who loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who hates the homelands of others.
- Johannes Rau
The gods work nine to five. At night we're on our own.
- Chet Rayno
Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretenses, they are usually your best defense.
Resent a fallacy as much as an insult.
A boy is youngest when he thinks himself a man.
- Mary Renault
The trouble with life is that everyone has views about it.
- Jean Renoir
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward at the time, and a courageous person afterward.
- Jean Paul Richter
Good evening, genties and ladlemen.
- Spider Robinson
If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.
- Dennis Roch
I didn't think; I experimented.
- Wilhelm Roentgen
You are special and so is everyone else in the world.
- Fred ("Mister") Rogers
Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by
- Will Rogers
The only proof of fame, as opposed to notoriety, is to have your name printed in journals without descriptive qualifications.
- Elihu Root
Miscellaneous is always the largest category.
- Joel Rosenberg
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
- Gioacchino Rossini
A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
- Leo C. Rosten
I'm a fellow who works in the vineyard of compromise.
- Dan Rostenkowski
What Jung calls 'the uncontrollability of real things' a registered nurse just calls 'life.'
We'll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and the workers - we will have the culture of the peasants and the workers.
Looking back I think of my life as one long speech that I've been listening to. The rhetoric is sometimes original, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes pasteboard crap, sometimes maniacal, sometimes matter of fact, and sometimes like the sharp prick of a needle, and I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember: how to think, how not to think; how to behave; how not to behave; whom to loathe and whom to admire; what to embrace and when to escape; what is rapturous, what is murderous, what is laudable, what is shallow, what is sinister, what is shit, and how to remain pure in my soul. The book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived where I am, the answer surprises me: "Listening."
Beware the utopia of isolation!
Born-again Christianity is the ignorant man's version of the intellectual life.
Who knew what getting old would be like? There may be a biological blinder about age that's built in. You are not supposed to understand until you get there. Just as an animal doesn't know about death, the human animal doesn't know about age.
- Philip Roth (adult link)
These were years of hope in which it was not foolish to hope.
He could not say boo to a goose, although there were many geese about.
He was forever having his heart out on the carpet.
What is waiting for you around the corner is life itself.
- A L Rowse
Letting people grow old will be another thing God will have to answer for when he meets His maker.
- Harry Ruby
It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.
- Howard Ruff
No matter who you marry you wake up married to somebody else.
- Damon Runyon
Reading Calvino, you are constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.
- Salman Rushdie
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
- Bertrand Russell
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
- David Russell
By Zeus, Soddy, they'd have us out as alchemists!
- Ernest Rutherford
A civil libertarian believes not only in liberty but in civility.
- William Safire
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Americans are mad for religion because, in the absence of civilization, what else have they?
- Saint-Gaudens (quoted by Gore Vidal)
Every top job needs two people - one who looks right and one who is right.
- Anthony Sampson
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Intelligence is the quickness in seeing things as they are.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
- George Santayana
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.
- Alan Saporta
When the rich make war it's the poor that die.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Men who have no appetites feel such spite for men who eat with relish.
- Steven Saylor
What Las Vega really sells, the most brilliant illusion of all, is loss that feels like winning.
- Eric Schlosser
Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Ego is always at the wheel.
- Delmore Schwartz
How easy it is for adults to bond over a second round of drinks.
The Greeks invented democracy, built the Acropolis and then they called it a day.
Every ear of corn, every chocolate covered raisin or shoelace, every barbecue tong, paper hat and store bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery.
There is only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
She was a nurse with a great set of tits and an ass you could get lost in. Jesus brought us together.
Were America's safety in my hands, we would all be wearing burlap bags and polishing the boots of any invader who could pronounce the word 'boo.'
It's confusing when a stupid man plays dumb.
- David Sedaris
A foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
A little water clears us of this deed.
A love that grows as we decay
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
Blasts and fogs upon thee!
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
Confession now has made his masterpiece.
Experience is by industry achieved.
For such as I am all true lovers are: unstaid and skittish in all motions else save in the constant image of the creature that is beloved.
Full of scorpions is my mind.
Gloucester - Oh let me kiss that hand! Lear - Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.
I am one of those gentle ones that will use the devil himself with courtesy.
I do not endanger my immortal soul gratis. [Merry Wives]
I drink to the general joy of the whole table. [Macbeth]
I was not born under a rhyming planet. [Much Ado About Nothing]
I will make you full of growing.
If a man were porter at hell's date there'd be less turning the key.
If it stands well by him, it stands well by her.
If it were done, it was done then best it were done quickly.
Let your bounty take a nap, I will awake it anon.
Lord! The differences of men!
Oh love! What a stout hearted child thou art!
[Kissing] I would fain be nibbling.
Let us be thankful for that what is.
Let us put on manly readiness.
Let's quaff some carousers to this gentleman!
Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it.
Madness in great ones must not go unwatched.
May fair thoughts and happy days attend you.
Mine eyes are made the fool of the other senses or worth all the rest.
My lord, if you but give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him.
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.
Often the instruments of darkness tell us true.
One that goes the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.
Pranks and friskens.
That is a step on which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, for in my way it lies. [Macbeth]
The heretic is he who lights the fire, not he who burns.
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation.
These wise men that give fools money get themselves a good report - after fourteen years purchase.
The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft.
The parson provides the proverbs and the no verbs. [Merry Wives]
The wicked fire of lust has melted him in his own grease. [Merry Wives]
They did make love to their employment. [Hamlet]
This is a step on which I must fall down, or else o'er leap.. but in my way it lies.
Thou are the Mars of malcontents.
Thou hast no more brains than I have in my elbows.
Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.
Through tattered rags small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.
To look into the seeds of time and see which one will sprout.
Vex not his ghost. Oh, let him pass. He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.
Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.
- Shakespeare
The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion.
- Shankarachanya
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
I often quote myself, it adds spice to my conversation.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
May God, in his infinite mercy, damn him interminably.
Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.
She was incapable of happiness. But she was not incapable of the pleasure of holding a man against his will.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
The difference between a duchess and a flower-girl is not how they act but how they are treated.
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
The only thing the young can do for the old is shock them and keep them up to date.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
[on the creation of the British National Theater by means of a large gift from a German industrialist] Like the celebrated swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this situation" and let it pass without another word.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
- George Bernard Shaw
I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.
I: this strange little thing that everyone has, this odd, tiny organ which the surgeons can't touch.
- Wallace Shawn
The ancient teachers promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little and have performed miracles.
- Mary Shelly
I am the Roman Emperor and am above grammar.
- Emperor Sigismund
To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.
- Ignazio Silone
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.
- John Simon
When you looked into her eyes it was like two district attorneys looking back.
- Neil Simon
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
- Lee Simonson
My father was always around to piss on my dreams.
- Frank Sinatra
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- Upton Sinclair
Men want all women to lie down as whores and get up as virgins.
- Isaac B. Singer
He not only overflowed with learning, he stood in the slop.
What you don't know would make a great book.
- Sydney Smith
Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
- Carrie P. Snow
On being asked if a man should choose a wife, replied "whether he should choose one or not, he would live to regret it."
- Socrates
Work is what you do for others, liebchen, art is what you do for yourself.
Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.
Near is better than far but it is still not there.
- Stephen Sondheim
Now when we look to him we are all afraid; he is the pilot of our ship and he is frightened.
What the state has long held hateful, hate, and respect what it loves.
I know I am only a man; I have no more to hope for in the end than you have.
When you know me, rebuke me; not till then!
There's no gag like terror.
The gods never move more swiftly then when punishing men with the consequences of their own actions.
- Sophocles
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
- Herbert Spencer
Negative information is not the same as NO information.
- Doctor Spock
I still buy a car based on what it would be like to live in it.
- Jerry Stahl
There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.
- Robert L. Stanfield
It's not often you can find all you want in one place - wine, food, love, firewood.
Pray God someday kind people won't all be poor.
Sin is somethin' you ain't sure about.
The law changes but the 'got to's' go on.
- John Steinbeck
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
- Gloria Steinem
If you are genteel enough, imprecision is possible.
There is the Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is.
- Wallace Stevens
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
- Adlai Stevenson
You start a question, and it's like starting a stone.
I make it a rule of mine - the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Such unscientific balderdash would have estranged Damon and Phythias.
He thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as the habit of mysterious things when well examined.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Irony among the lower classes is the first sign of an awakening of social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange or expend itself in liberal journalism.
I have often observed that stoical principles are most easily borne by those of Epicurean habits.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about which depend upon causes we know absolutely nothing about.
War is capitalism with the gloves off.
To be an artist in Zurich in 1917 implied a degree of self absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
The odd thing about revolutionaries is that the further left they go, the more bourgeois they like their art.
He was a private man who wished his total indifference to public notice be universally recognized.
Don't leer; it suits you.
If there is no God, it is a terrible waste of a good joke.
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
You get what you interrogate for.
The appalling thing about love is that it uses up one's moral judgment.
The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
[Rosencrantz to Hamlet] To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped up on his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner.
- Tom Stoppard
In the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rented car.
- Larry Summers
It is soothing to underestimate an enemy but it is often fatal, too.
- Sun Tzu
He was a bold man that first eat on oyster.
Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
- Jonathan Swift
I was not more clever than most people but I was a day earlier. [on his escape from Nazi Germany]
- Leo Szilard
It is not your part to finish the task; yet neither are you free to desist from it.
- Tarfon
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
- Rabindranath Tagore
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
- Andres S. Tannenbaum
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
- Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
- Elizabeth Taylor
I do not believe that the great object in life is to make everything as cheap as possible.
- Henry Teller
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph.
- Shirley Temple
Fortune favours the brave.
If you can't have what you want, do try to want what you can have.
- Terence
The persons who most hate Irishmen most are Irishmen.
- William Makepeace Thackery
The kingdom of God is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.
- Gospel of Thomas
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
Las Vegas - what most of the world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.
The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong but to those who can see it coming and jump away.
- Hunter Thompson
A carrot's development is not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
After a night's sleep, the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.
Any fool can make a rule.
As is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
Do not suppose a case, but take the case that is.
Gossip, taken in homeopathic doses, is really refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
I am convinced that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime.
I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.
I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theater, that my life itself has become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man.
I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
I have traveled a good deal in Concord.
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject - I care not how obscene my words are - but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity.
I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
If I repent of anything, it is likely to be of my good behavior.
If you give money spend yourself with it, and not merely abandon it on them.
It is difficult to begin without borrowing.
It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.
It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations.
Men have become tools of their tools.
Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
Much is published but little is printed.
My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing.
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the Workman whose work we are.
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being for ever on the alert.
Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Our civilization is a transcript.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy he can?
Some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough.
Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.
The coming of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos.
The cost of a thing is that amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.
The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
The oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.
The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
There are now-a-days professors of philosophy but not philosophers.
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird building its own nest.
There was pasture enough for my imagination.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches.
We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our aliment.
What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.
Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.
While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.
- Henry David Thoreau
To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.
-Thucydides
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
- James Thurber
To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.
- Lionel Tiger
Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
- Henrik Tikkanen
I'd give $1000 to be a millionaire.
- Lewis Timberlake
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
- Alvin Toffler
Nature is kind but science is more reliable.
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women.
- Tolstoy
All my life I wanted to be somebody. Now I realize I should have been more specific.
Eternity is just time on an ego trip.
I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
No matter how cynical you get, you just can't keep up.
Remember, we're all in this alone.
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.
- Lily Tomlin
No doubt, a scientist isn't necessarily penalized for being a complex, versatile, eccentric individual with lots of extra-scientific interests. But it certainly doesn't help him a bit.
- Stephen Toulmin
A man who has money always wants more and wants it to come easy.
Good night and sweet dreams of sugar and silken undies.
- B Traven
I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.
There is a law of the universe which says that "the crunchy part's the best."
You can't fool all of the people all of the time but you might as well give it your best shot.
- Calvin Trillin
Of all things the most desirable would have been to have had it published to the public, and then annulled by the clamour of an indignant world, loud in the defence of his rights. But of such an event the chance was small; a slight fraction only of the world would be indignant, and that fraction would be one not accustomed to loud speaking.
The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.
It is impossible to see the doubles of such a man.
- Anthony Trollope
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Doing the right thing is a lot easier than knowing what it is.
The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know.
- Harry Truman
As long as your going to be thinking anyway, think big.
- Donald Trump
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
- Edward Tryon
When you look in the mirror you see the Savior.
Go Humanity!
- Ted Turner
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Be good and you will be lonesome.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know.
I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than with Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
No one is quite the same at night.
Researchers have already cast much darkness on this subject, and, if they continue their investigations, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.
Supposing is good but finding out is better.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- Mark Twain
Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
- John Tyndall
My country invaded Central America and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
I wish I was deep instead of just macho
Change is inevitable except from a vending machine
I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain so that I could be a vegetarian
IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you got.
Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of smart.
Make it idiot proof and the world will invent a better idiot.
Lottery: a tax on people who are bad at math.
Practice organic warfare.
- T-shirts/bumper stickers
A case of economic ennui.
A commode hugging drunk.
A disappointed romantic is a man who dines alone in a restaurant where there is music.
A man can be dangerous when he doesn't care about money.
A man is always working for the second husband.
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.
A: Run for the hills! B: But the enemy is coming from the hills! A: Run from the hills! Run from the hills! If you see the hills, run the other way!
Attitudes are not taught; attitudes are caught.
Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.
America was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.
An apology is a good way to have the last word.
An easily understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a complex, incomprehensible truth.
Anger is more useful than despair.
Apollo doesn't always load up his bow. Sometimes he picks up his lyre and plays.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.
Be arrogant, be elegant, be smart.
Be prepared not to become the man you might have been.
Beshrew him that's last at yonder stile!
Beware of falling in love with your first answer.
Beware the man who makes a fortune from a flood.
By the time I got to the right place at the right time, I was the wrong age.
Chronology is the last refuge of the feeble-minded.
Chuck you, Farley.
Communism is a lot better than having some fat guy sitting up on the hill eating everything.
Complex, incomprehensible truth.
Conservators are not especially curious about those parts of the universe that are not crumbling.
Conviction is a luxury available only to those on the sidelines.
Courage is having done it before.
Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you.
Detachment, reflection, analysis and commitment.
Devotion to self interest produces political incoherence.
Do carp eat goldfish? If so, send me some carp. (letter to Congressman John Logan)
Do you want the whole truth, the half truth or a little of both?
Does the stabbing hurt the knife?
Don't confuse babysitting with love.
Etiquette is for people who have no breeding; fashion is for those who have no taste.
Every minute is another chance to turn it all around.
Failure is not quite as frightening as regret.
Faint heart never fucked a pig.
Flash! I love you! But we have only fourteen hours to save the earth!
Forget about what you are escaping from and reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
God created man because he loved the stories.
God is an atheist because he does not believe in a higher being.
Good things take time; great things happen all at once.
He could be ruined again and again by hope but he was never capable of belief.
He suffered from anorexia of the charisma
He was a straight forward as a sentence without commas. [on Truman]
He was a thick as a whale omelet.
He who laughs, lasts.
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Help me, Obi-Wan kenobi. You're my only hope.
History is philosophy taught with examples.
How does a thermos know when to keep something hot and when to keep it cold?
I am not absent minded; I am present minded somewhere else.
I don't care if he dances like St. Vitus himself.
I don't know whether to cry my eyes out, scream my head off or wet my pants. (Poster at Three Mile Island)
I feel like a wurzled gummage.
I grandly thought that I would be the master and time would be my slave.
I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
I wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so good.
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
I'm not a handmaiden to the arts; I'm more a day woman.
I'm only brilliant when the chance is past.
I've been bawled out, balled up, held up, held down, hung up, bulldozed, blackjacked, walked on, cheated, squeezed and mooched, stuck for war tax, excess profit tax, sales tax, dog tax and sin tax, liberty bonds, baby bonds and the bonds of matrimony, Red Cross, Blue Cross and the double cross; I've worked like hell, worked others like hell, have got drunk and got others drunk, lost all I had and now, because I won't spend or lend what little I earn, beg, borrow or steal I've been cussed, discussed, boycotted, talked to, talked about, lied to, lied about, worked over, pushed under, robbed and damn near ruined. The only reason I'm stickin' around is to see what the hell is next.
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
If her dress had been any shorter, it would have been a belt.
If the buck is going to be passed, it might as well be passed from someone with plenty of them.
If you anticipate everything you'll be ready for the unanticipated.
If you are going to hold a meeting, it had better come to more than poking holes in the air with your finger.
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
If you don't get it, it's not for you.
If you don't know where you are going, the slightest wind will take you there.
If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
If you think that what you do doesn't mean anything, just wait and see what happens when you fuck up.
If you want to learn to play the game, bet more than you can afford to lose.
In order to know where a man stands, you have to understand how he got to where he is standing.
Is the rabbit the magician?
It ain't braggin' if ya really done it.
It has always been my philosophy that it is easier to apologize than it is to ask permission.
It is only hard to break up if the other person remains alive
It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.
It's not that you and I are so clever, but that the others are such fools.
Keep your women guessing, particularly if you have nothing to hide.
Kitty: I was reading a book the other day. Carlotta: Reading a book?? Kitty: Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession? Carlotta: Oh, my dear. That's something you need never worry about.
LA - Sunset and Gomorrah
Larva should be seen but not heard.
Life is something not only to be savored but to be kissed madly on the mouth.
Many busy parents are inclined to be both negligent and over indulgent of their children.
Men are not punished for their sins but by them.
Most people bring to bed with them the worst of their biography.
Never mess around with someone who has access to your underwear.
No politician can really stand a frisk.
No self respecting reform movement is complete without a scandal.
Old age hasn't taught me a lot but it's sure taught me the value of a dollar, a kind word and a drink of whiskey.
Once I had ceased to believe that reality existed. Now I know that it does, though not for me.
One is immortal for as long as one lives.
People only notice what you tell them to notice. And then only if you remind them.
Principles only mean something if you stick by them when they are inconvenient.
Sacrilege is the exclusive territory of the devout.
Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.
She wore a dress so tight you could read the date on her underwear.
Sign over the workbench of a clock repairman: Twelve dollars an hour./ More if you're rich./ Even more if you help.
Some times God just likes to put two guys in a paper bag and let 'em rip.
Someone has to guard the gates of Hell.
Sound the horn or become the quarry.
Speedily a tale is spin; with much les speed a deed is done.
Spit's all that's holding me together.
Staggering ineptitude is not proof of sinister behavior.
Success brings litigation.
Take one step at a time; that is what you have two feet for.
Tell the truth and run.
That men created God in their own image is shown by the fact that God hates the same people the men hate.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The companies that get unions, deserve unions.
The cowards never started, the weak died on the way; only the strong arrived. [Pioneers]
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
The end of living and the beginning of survival.
The end of the chain of whys.
The first 90% of a job takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of a job takes the other 90% of the time.
The major domo of fear is habit.
The meek shall inherit the Earth after we're done with it.
The numerator of fortune must be balanced by the denominator of work.
The only thing I ever wrote that was published was a sign reading "This side up."
The only thing we all have in common is our differences.
The only thing wrong with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.
The only truly happy people are those you don't know very well.
The purpose of education is to foster growth, not to establish dominance.
The purpose of freedom is to free others.
The really happy man is the one who can enjoy the scenery when he has to take a detour.
The recipe for disaster is to be not fully convinced of your cause.
The reverse side also has a reverse side.
The stingy person pays the most.
The Torah itself can sometimes push aside the study of Torah.
The truth will set you free. But first it is really gonna piss you off.
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
The upper crust of lowlife.
The weakest fruit drops earliest to the ground.
The word 'faith' connotes nothing but the willing blindness to the lack of proof.
The worst thing about being a clone is that you have no one to blame but yourself.
There is a fine line between the truly noble and the really dumb.
There is no gravity. The Earth sucks.
There is nothing wrong with rationalization as long as you admit you're doing it.
There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock.
They came, they saw, they did a little shopping. [graffiti on Berlin Wall a week or so after it was opened.]
They talk of my drinking but never of my thirst.
Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
Tis a little wonderful and what I believe few people have thought much upon - namely the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing of one particle of bread.
Tomorrow the sun will rise and who knows what the tide will bring?
Topology is flexible geometry.
Trying to predict the future without a knowledge of the past is like trying to grow a bouquet by planting cut flowers.
We don't go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go.
We get so concerned with the urgent, we never have time to deal with the important.
We have had enough "oughta be's"; what we need now is an is.
We have this agreement - I don't tell what I know about him and he doesn't tell that I was there at the time.
What God thinks of money is shown by the people he gives it to.
What is superficial is not necessarily irrelevant.
When life requires it, change slogans.
When you start whining that someone should do something, remember that you are someone.
While of knowledge there be little, of books there be a plenty.
Why is it that every woman I ever meet is either too young, too old, too crazy, too drunk or out of reach?
Women don't understand power. That is why there will never be a woman king.
You can get into more trouble from a good idea than from a bad one.
You can't make bacon and eggs without slaughtering a hog.
You can't spell obsequious without the IOU.
You were not put here to save the whole earth; just do as much as you can.
Your body is just the place your memories call home.
Your job is to open the Universe a little bit more.
- Unknown.
Classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, the docile
All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
- John Updike
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
- Jeff Valdez
I felt his soul lingering near me for a few moments and then it was gone and something of me went with it. [on the death of his brother Vincent]
- Theo Van Gogh
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
- Henry Van Dyke
A conservative is a man who does not think that anything should be done for the first time.
- Frank Vanderlip
I have no wish to be the recipient of God's appalling news.
The Vice Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.
We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong.
- B Vaughan
The heaviest object in the world is the body of the woman you have ceased to love.
- Vauvenargues
As much use as a woolen bucket.
They don't know how to hide their feelings and you don't know how to listen.
- de Vega
One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.
- Peter de Vries
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
I have always found it strange that a nation whose prosperity is based upon cheap immigrant labor should be so unrelentingly xenophobic.
I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
Never brood upon the past. Think always of the future and how much worse it is bound to be.
One man's Gethsemane is another man's Coney Island.
What Sunday means to a woman is beyond me.
- Gore Vidal
Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.
It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce
When its a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
A witty saying proves nothing.
- Voltaire
In mathematics you don't understand things; you just get used to them.
- John von Neumann
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
How embarrassing it is to be human.
Any form of government, not just capitalism, is whatever the people who have got all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
- Kurt Vonnegut
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
- Charles Wadsworth
My boyhood was a pretty rough passage. I came through it, yes. But it was luck, luck, luck. Think of the others!
- Senator Robert F. Wagner
If you're in despair, you don't know how to be part of your own life anymore.
- Naomi Wallace
Ah, the jolly sunshine of life!
- Artemus Ward
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
- Edith Warton
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
- James Watson
There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
- Bill Watterson
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
- Alan Watts
A politician is the Devil's quilted anvil.
Ah, you sweet armful. [to a baby]
- John Webster
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
The evidence for all these miracles seems to me to be considerably weaker than the evidence for cold fusion, and I don't believe in cold fusion.
- Steven Weinberg
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
No passion on Earth, neither love nor hate, is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
- H G Wells
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
- Orson Wells
She brewed tea so strong a mouse could trot over it.
Spring has the Lord's thumbprint on it.
A goose is a snake on stilts.
- Jessamyn West
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it
I never loved another person the way I loved myself
Too much of a good thing is wonderful
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before
Save a boyfriend for a rainy day - and another, in case it doesn't rain
He who hesitates is a damned fool.
- Mae West
The universe is becoming beneficent at a great rate.
- Rebecca West
You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.
- Hermann Weyl
Empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics.
He [Bohr] had two speeds - not interested and completely interested.
- John Wheeler
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
Writing can be as dangerous as painting luminous dials on watches.
- E B White
Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.
- Katherine Whitehorn
It would be comforting news indeed if we could find a scheme or a plan or even a hint of conspiracy in life.
- Edward Whittemore
Character is what you are in the dark.
- Lord John Whorfin
Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
- Eugene Wigner
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
A gentleman is one who never inflicts pain. [Cardinal Newman] Unintentionally [Oscar Wilde]
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I can resist anything except temptation.
I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
Men always want to be a woman's first love; women like to be a mans last romance.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
The second rate imitate, the great steal.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
When men give up saying what is charming they soon given up thinking what is charming.
When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
From The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon Moncrieff: I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It's very romantic to be in love but there's nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one might be accepted. One usually is I believe. Then the whole excitement is over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Lady Bracknell: Are your parents living? Jack (né Ernest) Worthing: I have lost both my parents. Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Lady Bracknell: Do you smoke? Jack (né Ernest) Worthing: Well yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell: I'm glad to hear it. A man should have an occupation of some kind.
Lady Bracknell: Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
Canon Chasuble: Charity dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts.
Jack (né Ernest) Worthing: Algy, you don't suppose that Gwendolyn will become like her mother - in about one hundred and fifty years, do you? Algernon Moncrieff: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
Jack (né Ernest) Worthing: You are quite perfect Miss Fairfax. Gwendolyn Fairfax: Oh I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.
Cecily Cardew: When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolyn Fairfax: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.
Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Gwendolyn Fairfax: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on a train.
Lady Bracknell: To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other's characters before marriage. Which I think is never advisable
Lady Bracknell: Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
Jack Worthing: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
Jack Worthing: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left. Algernon Moncreiff: We have. Jack Worthing: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? Algernon Moncreiff: The fools? Oh, about the clever people, of course. Jack Worthing: What fools!
- Oscar Wilde
Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is and, finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room...
- Andrew Wiles
I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
- Bern Williams
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
- Margery Williams
It is almost impossible for someone to believe that they are not loved by someone they believe they are in love with.
God: his oblivious majesty.
A: What did I do to deserve this compliment? B: It is not a compliment. It is a report.
- Tennessee Williams
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes.
- William Carlos Williams
He looked like he owed the Devil a day's work.
I've heard the life say it be one thing and end up being another.
Death comes like a thief in the night and he don't away empty handed.
A woman like you everybody want; a woman like you get the pick of the lot.
- August Wilson
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods; it did not evolve to believe in biology.
- Edward O. Wilson
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
- Woodrow Wilson
I may not be playing with a full deck but I don't need a full deck. I have four aces.
Versatility is a curse. It is the one dimensional people who make all the money.
- Jonathan Winters
Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.
- Edward Witten
Her look could open an oyster at sixty paces.
Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.
You can't be a sucessful Dictator and design women's underclothing. One or the other. Not both.
- P. G. Wodehouse
Fear won't always save you but it will take some of the pressure off your luck.
- Tobias Wolff
Life is granite and rainbows.
- Virginia Woolf
If you don't pitch in your part and I don't pitch in my part, then the poor people won't have a part to pitch in.
- Ernest P. Worrell
Better honest arrogance than hypocritical humbleness.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
I have an existential map. It has "You are here" written all over it.
- Steven Wright
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
- W. B. Yeats
Not even Adam would ever had taken a wife if Jehovah had not knocked him unconscious.
- Yiddish
Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it.
- Andrew Young
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.
- Xenophon
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.
- Henny Youngman
As a final incentive before giving up a difficult task, try to imagine it successfully accomplished by someone you violently dislike.
- K. Zenios