Quotes



Timing is everything.
--

We're kind of defined by our mistakes.
-- Tommy Shaw

In War, truth is the first casualty.
-- Aeschylus

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
-- Aeschylus

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
-- Aeschylus

The reward of suffering is experience.
-- Aeschylus

Ability to see the cultural value of Wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
-- Aldo Leopold

All that serves labor serves the nation. All that harms is treason. If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America without labor, and to fleece the one is to rob the other.
-- Abraham Lincoln

No mathematician can be a complete mathematician unless he is also something of a poet.
-- Karl Weierstrass

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [ Who will guard the guard(ian)s? ]
--

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin.

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
-- Muhammad Ali

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in your own image.
-- Stephen Hawking

Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
-- Noam Chomsky

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
-- Carlos Fuentes

Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
-- Miguel de Unamuno

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
-- Paul Anderson

'Truth' never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation.
-- Anton Lavey

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination - but the combination is locked up in the safe.
-- Peter DeVries

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe.
-- John Muir

I have long since understood that Germans weren't different than Brits or Americans or anyone else, though their circumstances were different, but for those who still don't understand mass subservience to vile crimes induced by structural processes of great power and breadth, I have to admit that I mostly just want to shout: Look around, dammit!
-- Michael Albert

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he is good only because he is restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-- Carl Sagan

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-- John Stuart Mill

It is a great disadvantage to fight with those who have nothing to lose.
-- Jonathan Swift

If you must get into a fight with a skunk, never let the skunk choose the weapons.
-- Joe Cannon (speaker of House of Representatives)

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
-- Aesop

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
-- Voltaire

To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters.
-- Voltaire

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S. Truman

If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.
-- Anonymous

If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
-- Lily Tomlin

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his cell.
-- Simone Weil

We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we commercialize art, we cherish success and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. The kids know that if we really valued learning, we would pay our teachers what we pay our lawyers and stockbrokers. If we valued art, we would not measure it by its capacity to produce profits. If we regarded literature as important, we would remove it from the celebrity sweepstakes and spend a little money on our libraries.
-- Russell Baker

The first law of holes: If you are in one, stop digging.
-- Anonymous

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

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
-- Erma Bombeck

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
-- Janis Joplin

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
-- Cynthia Nelms

Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.
--William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969.

If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago.
--Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.
--Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General.

What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau

You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled.
--Tahanie (Native American)

Don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we got 'til it's gone. They pave Paradise and put up a parking lot.
-- from a song by Joni Mitchell

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey, Speech, Gannon College, 11 October 1966

I would argue that practices that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs.
-- Bruce Babbitt

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
-- Haile Selassie (1892-1975)

All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing.
-- Edmond Burke

We cannot solve the problems that we have created with the same thinking that created them.
-- Albert Einstein

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
-- Albert Einstein

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein

I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I -- nor would I want to -- conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
-- Albert Einstein

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
-- The Dalai Lama

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- the Buddha

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right.
-- Scott Turow (NYT 17-jan-03)

Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
-- Colleen C. Barrett

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
-- Colette

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
-- Erica Jong

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
-- Rebecca West

I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy.
-- (coffee mug)

We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.
-- Anais Nin

There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is hungry for information. It has latched on to an electronic tube as its main source of nourishment.
-- Joan Ganz Cooney

Natural curiosity is dead. It has been extinguished by the media.
-- Jean Chambers

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
-- Soren Kierkegaard

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
-- Helen Keller

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
-- Dolly Parton

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
-- Gloria Steinem

If age imparted wisdom, there wouldn't be any old fools.
-- Claudia Young

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
-- Theodore M. Hesburgh

Data, data everywhere, and not a thought to think.
-- Jesse H. Shera (1903-1982) ["The computer is here to stay, therefore it must be kept in its proper place as a tool and a slave, or we will become sorcerer's apprentices, with data data everywhere and not a thought to think." "Librarianship and information science," (in Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield, The study of information: interdisciplinary messages, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1983)]

And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president's spouse. I wish him well.
-- Barbara Bush (commencement address to Wellesley College)

Heart Attacks...God's revenge for eating his animal friends.
-- bumper sticker

No matter how love-sick a woman is, she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along.
-- Joyce Brothers

The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing - and then they marry him.
-- Cher

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
-- Timothy Leary

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.
-- Former U. S. Vice President Dan Quayle

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
-- Indira Gandhi

Old age is no place for sissies.
-- Bette Davis

If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.
-- Sue Grafton

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
-- John Lennon

Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes America great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we have tolerated the last eight years?
-- Frank Zappa, Feb 1, 1989

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.
-- Jack Handey

Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
-- Stephen Wright


Last modified: Mon Apr 2 10:09:17 EST 2007