Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => Literature, Music, Art & Entertainment => Topic started by: Aruntraveller on June 24, 2019, 09:38:25 PM
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I've been toying with the idea of a QFTD thread for awhile, but life has been busy and I never seemed to find quite the right quote to kick things off.
However, a trawl through a Dickens quotation website threw this little beauty up:
Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.
Seemed apposite somehow.
I will endeavour to provide a quote each day, but if anyone else feels inclined feel free to jump in. It will save me the bother!
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I like this one from the US journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956).
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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Ambrose Bierce
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
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Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I’m happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion. Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others.
— William Thurston, Fields-medal winning mathematician
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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
Isn't that the name of that little Japanese robot designed by Honda?
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Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”
― Bill Hicks
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It's all fake news!
... Donald Trump
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Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
made up name if ever I've heard one 8)
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"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself."
Rumi
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If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
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"Bug'rit, says I. Millenium hand and shrimp". Foul ole Ron. (Terry Pratchett.)
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“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
Schopenhauer
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"I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing."
D.D. Barant,
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Who is this D D Barant, and how the heck does he know me so well?
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Who is this D D Barant, and how the heck does he know me so well?
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It is a bit too close
https://us.macmillan.com/author/ddbarant
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Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?
Chuck Palahniuk
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It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.
Deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
8)
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"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
H L Mencken
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“Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently, and for the same reason.”
Eça de Queirós
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“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”
― David Sedaris
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"Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery."
Stephen Crane
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"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Winston Churchill
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When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
John Lennon
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"Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future."
Niels Bohr
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"Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future."
Niels Bohr
Reminds of the notice on the village hall door:
Due to unforeseen circumstances
Tonight's talk on The Benefits of Fortune Telling has been cancelled.
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"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Napoleon Bonaparte
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"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Except, of course, you can be both. Step forward one Boris Johnson and take a bow.
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"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."
Robert L. Park
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Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish............. Euripides.
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"There are perhaps 5% of the population that simply can't think. There are another 5% who can, and do. The remaining 90% can think, but don't."
Robert A. Heinlein
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"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen. "
W. H. Auden
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"Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes" - roughly If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants
Guillame de Conches via Bernard of Chartres and Isaac Newton
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"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell
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Was Bertrand Russell being cock sure when he said that or full of doubt?
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"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell
I prefer Yeat's phrasing in The Second Coming
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
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“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman
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"Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth. " Bo Burnham
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"I'm not arguing there are no decent people in the Tory party, but they're like bits of sweetcorn in a turd; technically they've kept their integrity, but they're still embedded in shit."
Holly in The Quarry by Iain Banks
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"The sudden appearance of mushrooms after a summer rain is one of the more impressive spectacles of the plant world." John Tyler Bonner
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"After tea it's back to painting - a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often."
Gustav Klimt
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"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."
Abraham Lincoln
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"The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs."
Charles Baudelaire
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"The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs."
Charles Baudelaire
the absolute definition of a pompous twat ! 💃💃💃
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the absolute definition of a pompous twat ! 💃💃💃
And to quote Baudelaire once more
"In this regards, my friend, you're like the public, to whom one should never offer a delicate perfume. It exasperates them. Give them only carefully selected garbage."
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And to quote Baudelaire once more
"In this regards, my friend, you're like the public, to whom one should never offer a delicate perfume. It exasperates them. Give them only carefully selected garbage."
Heineken work on exactly the same principle
Cheers old fruit 🍻
Btw , did he have anything to say about referendums ?
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Heineken work on exactly the same principle
Cheers old fruit 🍻
Btw , did he have anything to say about referendums ?
First of all on the subject of drink
"It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."
On referendums
"Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious."
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First of all on the subject of drink
"It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."
On referendums
"Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious."
Thanks Saney
I like that . Another one to print out and keep safe in my wallet to remind me of you 😜
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Thanks Saney
I like that . Another one to print out and keep safe in my wallet to remind me of you 😜
"I was walking down fifth avenue today and I found a wallet, and I was gonna keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: well, if I lost a hundred and fifty dollars, how would I feel? And I realized I would want to be taught a lesson." Emo Philips
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"I was walking down fifth avenue today and I found a wallet, and I was gonna keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: well, if I lost a hundred and fifty dollars, how would I feel? And I realized I would want to be taught a lesson." Emo Philips
you're on fire today old chap
Quick ! Somebody piss on him 😎
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"There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them."
Niels Bohr
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"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. "
Charles Bukowski
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"The space within becomes the reality of the building."
Frank Lloyd Wright
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
Confucius
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"It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them."
Agatha Christie
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When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
Dmitri Shostakovich
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The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
Bertrand Russell
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The new Liberal woman is toxic to both womanhood and manhood.
~ Shieena Waters
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"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
Rebecca West
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"There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad."
Salvador Dali
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"I don't want it good. I want it Tuesday."
Jack L. Warner
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"First they came for the journalists, and I did nothing for I was not a journalist.
Then, I didn't hear anything more about it. Hang on, there's someone at the door..."
Betty Bowers (America's 'Best' Christian)
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"The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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"You will not fuck with my children’s future. You will not destroy the freedoms my grandfather fought two world wars to defend. Fuck off you over-promoted rubber bath toy. Britain is revolted by you and you little gang of masturbatory prefects."
Hugh Grant, to Boris Johnson
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"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks."
Warren Buffett
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"I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity."
Van Morrison
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"We are all in this together, by ourselves."
Lily Tomlin
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"The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way."
Keanu Reeves
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"In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery."
Malcolm Gladwell
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"We'll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs."
Tony Blair before he became an MP in 1983.
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"Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness."
Ivan Illich
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"If lies were flies, the swarm around him would be so thick that Boris Johnson would be invisible. His gruff, mock-jovial Etonian tones would be drowned out by their incessant, deafening hum. "
Fintan O'Toole
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'I'd rather be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit'
Boris Johnson
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"I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that. Don't rush into adulthood, it isn't all that much fun."
Bob Newhart
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On Jo Johnson's decision to resign from parliament - "The first example of a politician stepping down to spend less time with their family?" Theresa Griffin, MEP
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The cup of our trouble is running over, but, alas, is not yet full.
Sir Boyle Roche MP
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Sustainable growth is growth that is sustainable.
John Major.
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A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.
Booker T Washington
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"Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening."
Greta Garbo
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"If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one."
Frances Farmer
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"There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age."
Sophia Loren
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"My definition of a redundancy is an air-bag in a politician's car."
Larry Hagman
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"Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together."
Joan Jett
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"You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses."
Bruce Springsteen
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"Action is character."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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"Money and success don't change people; they merely amplify what is already there."
Will Smith
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"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
Samuel Adams
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"A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you."
Brigitte Bardot
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"The 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
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I think, therefore I think I am.
Ann O' Nimous
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"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
Elie Wiesel
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"Sometimes I'm so sweet even I can't stand it."
Julie Andrews
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"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
Groucho Marx
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"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."
Gore Vidal
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"One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition."
Alvin Toffler
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"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."
Vaclav Havel
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"He behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts."
George Carman
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"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
Niels Bohr
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"There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true."
Ian Hart
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I think there's a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
Jody Williams
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"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it."
Helen Hayes
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"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity."
Eleanor Roosevelt
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"If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad."
Aleister Crowley
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"Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth."
Margaret Thatcher
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"Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."
Hannah Arendt
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Nationalism is quite different from patriotism. For nationalism you need enemies.
John le Carre.
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It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
P.G.Wodehouse.
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"Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth."
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was a vile, stoney-hearted old harridan.
Me. (And I bet that was written for her by a speechwriter; she was notorious for her utter lack of a sense of humour.)
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I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky.
I left my shoes and socks there -
I wonder if they're dry.
Spike Milligan, after John Masefield.
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Margaret Thatcher was a vile, stoney-hearted old harridan.
Me. (And I bet that was written for her by a speechwriter; she was notorious for her utter lack of a sense of humour.)
Ah more misogyny.
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"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory."
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Ah more misogyny.
One doesn't have to be a misogynist to detest Thatcher and all she stood for.
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Ah more misogyny.
You appear, in recent posts on various threads, to be trying to goad me into losing my temper, using some over-ripe language towards you, and getting suspended again. I'm afraid, though, that you won't succeed, as I am ignoring you from now on, unless you say something really silly, when I will answer you politely. You might end up looking a bit foolish.
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You appear, in recent posts on various threads, to be trying to goad me into losing my temper, using some over-ripe language towards you, and getting suspended again. I'm afraid, though, that you won't succeed, as I am ignoring you from now on, unless you say something really silly, when I will answer you politely. You might end up looking a bit foolish.
Again you seem to be under the misapprehension that people cannot just be disagreeing with you but must be doing so out of some ulterior motive.
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The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
Gunter Grass
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Alcohol will not solve all of your problems but neither will water!
Anon.
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"You can't say you're going to jump the Grand Canyon and then jump some other canyon."
Evel Knievel
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If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.
Alan Garner
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"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
Stephen King
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"Morality is the weakness of the brain."
Arthur Rimbaud
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"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We ask not slothful ease from toil -
'Tis nature's law, 'tis God's decree -
But let the hand that tills the soil
Be, like the wind that fans it, free.
From a 19th-Century anti-slavery hymn.
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“Life is one fool thing after another, whereas love is two fool things after each other.”
― Oscar Wilde
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"The role of anxiety in the development of human personality is central, and it is intricate beyond our understanding."
Timothy Leary
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"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito."
Anita Roddick
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"So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o'clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience."
Moss Hart
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"My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso."
Pablo Picasso
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The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L P Hartley
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"We know our wills are free, and there's an end on't." - Dr Johnson expressing some sturdy common sense, after Boswell unuccessfully tried to start a discussion with him about free-will.
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"We know our wills are free, and there's an end on't." - Dr Johnson expressing some sturdy common sense, after Boswell unuccessfully tried to start a discussion with him about free-will.
"'Sturdy common sense' - something you agree with without being able to justify"
NS
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Sometimes, asking for justification is silly. Take the cogito: it can't be logically defended, but doesn't need to be. If you understand it, you see that it must be true. if you try to argue against your own conscious existence, you immediately fall into a logical contradiction. So too, in my opinion, with free-will.
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JESSUP: You want answers?
KAFFEE: I want the truth!
JESSUP: You can't handle the truth!
A Few Good Men
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Money just draws flies.
Mahalia Jackson
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"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."
Fran Lebowitz
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"I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people."
Desiderius Erasmus
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"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."
James Boswell
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"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams
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"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent."
Neal Stephenson
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The Democrats and Republicans are the same guy admiring themself in the mirror.
Kinky Friedman
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"I have begun the 'History of England' by Mr. Hume. It seems to me very interesting, though it is necessary to recollect that it is a Protestant who has written it."
Marie Antoinette
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"It is really special and it was more than just a game for us. We are really grateful to have our families here and all I want to do is to inspire my kids and every other kid in South Africa. I never dreamed of a day like this at all. When I was a kid all I was thinking about was getting my next meal.
"A lot of us in South Africa just need an opportunity and there are so many untold stories. I'm hoping that we have just given people a bit of hope to pull together as a country to make it better."
Siya Kolisi
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"I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone - and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff - a perilous loss."
Dylan Moran
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"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
Will Rogers
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"I'm not young. What's wrong with that?"
Vivien Leigh
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He longed to be lost but he couldn't bear not to be found.
Ronald Blythe
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"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
Marie Curie
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"Despair has its own calms."
Bram Stoker
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"I can excuse everything but boredom. Boring people don't have to stay that way."
Hedy Lamarr
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The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.
Quentin Crisp
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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
Neil Gaiman
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"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
Kurt Vonnegut
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"The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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"You've got to vote for someone. It's a shame, but it's got to be done."
Whoopi Goldberg
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"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
P. J. O'Rourke
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"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."
Georgia O'Keeffe
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I am not prepared to stand aside and see this country engulfed by the racial conflict which calculating orators or ignorant prejudice can create. Nor in the great world confrontation on race and colour, where this country must declare where it stands, am I prepared to be a neutral, whether that confrontation is in Birmingham or Bulawayo. In these issues there can be no neutrals and no escape from decision. For in the world of today, while political isolationism invites danger and economic isolationism invites bankruptcy, moral isolationism invites contempt.
Harold Wilson
(Why does this still sound so relevant?)
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I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Jose Saramago
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Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.
Lev Vygotsky
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Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
Dick Cavett
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
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What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
Robert Kennedy
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We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Some things are true, even though the Daily Telegraph says they are true.
George Orwell.
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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
George Orwell
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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
George Orwell
Yes but I raise with this:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
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Yes but I raise with this:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
In other words, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts" - Daniel Patriick Mynihan.
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"Bollock-faced foghorn of ignorance."
Phillip Pullman on Nigel Fartage.
"Nicotine stained man-frog."
The New European's standard description of N.F.
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An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
George Eliot
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Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
Bertrand Russell
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"Bollock-faced foghorn of ignorance."
Phillip Pullman on Nigel Fartage.
"Nicotine stained man-frog."
The New European's standard description of N.F.
Unkind to both bollocks and frogs.
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Extraordinary quotation ::) :-
"I have been here in Saudi Arabia for 24 hours and all I have received is just extraordinary kindness. In fact it was so moving today, that I just feel this sort of…just huge embrace of love. And when asked in what do I believe more than anything else I just said 'hashtag kindness'. So it is a huge treat to be able to say Happy World Kindness Day."
Fergie
-
The monster was the best friend I ever had.
Boris Karloff
-
Extraordinary quotation ::) :-
"I have been here in Saudi Arabia for 24 hours and all I have received is just extraordinary kindness. In fact it was so moving today, that I just feel this sort of…just huge embrace of love. And when asked in what do I believe more than anything else I just said 'hashtag kindness'. So it is a huge treat to be able to say Happy World Kindness Day."
Fergie
Saudi Arabia is a ghastly regime, but, at the individual level, Muslims do have a reputation for kindness and hospitality towards strangers.
-
‘I am the song that sings the bird. / I am the leaf that grows the land. …I am the clay that shapes the hand. / I am the word that speaks the man.’
Charles Causley
I am the song
-
Never trust a man, who when left alone with a tea cosey... Doesn't try it on.
Billy Connolly
-
Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.
Charles Kennedy
-
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
Charles M. Schulz
-
No clear impressions, either from above or from without, can be received by a mind turbid with excitement and agitated by a crowd of distractions. The stillness needed for the clear shining of light within is incompatible with hurry.
Caroline Stephen
-
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
Jimi Hendrix
-
The light checks you, when you speak an evil word,
and tells you that you should not be proud or unrestrained,
nor fashion yourselves like the world;
for the fashion of this world passes away.
~ George Fox
-
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
Rita Mae Brown
-
“There is a moral point. If NHS services continue to be free in this way, they will continue to be abused like any free service. If people have to pay for them they will value them more. Above all, there is an economic point. In a very modest way, this extension of private funds into the NHS would help the Chancellor’s straitened circumstances”
Boris Johnson
-
Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.
Louisa May Alcott
-
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
-
Everyone carries around his own monsters.
Richard Pryor
-
Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddam rules.
Maria Callas
-
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Joseph Conrad
-
A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
Samuel Butler
-
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
-
I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
Steven Wright
-
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
Tom Waits
-
When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
John Banville
-
If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
PG Wodehouse
-
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.
John Milton
-
I'm flabbergasted — never has my flabber been so gasted!
Talbot Rothwell (attributed)
(The PG Wodehouse quote brought this to mind - strange thing my mind)
-
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
Emily Dickinson
-
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
-
“I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up”
― Lenny Bruce
-
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert
-
I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.
Heinrich Heine
-
I delight in what I fear.
Shirley Jackson
-
It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.
Henry Charles Carey
-
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
-
I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.
Bill Hicks
-
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven
-
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
Hector Hugh Munro
-
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson
-
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
Max Lerner
-
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.
William Drummond of Logiealmond
-
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West
-
A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.
Jean Racine
-
An awareness of one's mortality can lead you to wake up and live an authentic, meaningful life. Bernie Siegel
(Bollocks)
-
If you want a guarantee , buy a toaster
Clint Eastwood
-
To pacifists everywhere 😘
Fill your hands you son of a bitch !
Rooster Cogburn
-
Political orientation is unimportant in populism because it does not deal in evidence or detailed proposals for change but in the manipulation of feelings by charismatic leaders.
Margaret MacMillan
-
Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.
Ava Gardner
-
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
Quentin Crisp
-
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
Charles Babbage
-
If there is a supreme being, he's crazy.
Marlene Dietrich
-
(NS I can think of one fellow poster who would agree with that entirely.)
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
-
Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.
Kary Mullis
-
"Could a Bear be a Knight?" asked Pooh. "Of course he could!" said Christopher Robin. And he took a stick and touched Pooh on the shoulder, and said, "Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights." Pooh said "Thank you," and went into a dream.
~A.A.Milne
-
Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
Vera Brittain
-
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
Stephen Leacock
-
I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.
Henri Matisse
-
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
Ouida
-
'Today we are creating tomorrow's yesterday'.
-
One of those ghastly literary lunches .... [She] told us for three-quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
PG Wodehouse, 'The Girl In Blue'.
-
'Today we are creating tomorrow's yesterday'.
Who said it? Go on - surprise me.
-
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov
-
We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.
Lucretia Mott
-
I never use metaphors - I prefer not to beat about the bush.
Unnamed football manager, in an interview. (Probably apocryphal.)
-
We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
-
I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.
Florence King
-
The actor Ed Harris’s “penetrating gaze signals that this is a serious, somber man on a singular quest,” a writer observed in The Toronto Sun. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all.”
This sounds fine in the abstract, but when you actually witness somebody in the act of not suffering fools gladly, it looks rotten. Once I watched a senior member of the House of Representatives rip into a young reporter after she nervously asked him an ill-informed question.
She was foolish about that particular piece of legislation, but, in the moment, he looked the bigger fool. He was making a snap judgment about a person with no real information about her actual qualities. He was exposing a yawning gap between his own high opinion of himself and his actual conduct in the world. He was making the mistake, which metaphysical fools tend to make, that there is no connection between your inner moral quality and the level of courtesy you present to others.
David Brooks, New York Times.
I think it was the late Simon Hoggart who said something along the lines of "any bad-tempered mediocrity can fail to suffer fools gladly; the real praise in an obituary is 'he suffered fools gladly'".
-
Of course as with everyone the much missed Hoggart may not always have followed his own strictures
'Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.'
Simon Hoggart
-
Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.
Bjorn Lomborg
-
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Zora Neale Hurston
-
"People with lots of money seldom get hung. You only get hung for wanting money."
Edgar Wallace
-
Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.
Alfred Russel Wallace
-
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Donald Knuth
-
It is easy to predict that some of the discoveries of research directed towards Grand Challenges - but only the most unexpected ones, and at the most unexpected times - will be the basis of revolutionary improvements in the way that we exploit the power of our future computing devices.
Tony Hoare
-
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Edmund Burke
-
Paddington Bear was a refugee with a label - 'Please look after this bear. Thank you', and he had a little suitcase.
Michael Bond
-
“Twelve strangers," he interrupted, "twelve citizens picked off the street. In this world we're unfortunate to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on,where squalid politicians conspire with the squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I'm sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.”
― Reginald Hill
-
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
Maureen Dowd
-
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Moliere
-
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
-
The more they hate you, the better you're doing.
Andy Kaufman
-
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
Jacob Bronowski
-
I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.
Dolly Parton
-
“We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.”
John Lennon
-
“Most people are average, neither black nor white, but grey. A dirty shade of grey. To the best of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about their suspicious tendency towards murder.”
Dmitri Shostakovich
-
The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.
Jawaharlal Nehru
-
As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.”
― Iris Chang
-
We are always the same age inside.
Gertrude Stein
-
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C Clarke
-
I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.
Rosa Parks
-
A functioning police state needs no police.
William S. Burroughs
-
One of my theories is that men love with their eyes; women love with their ears.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
-
"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
Harvey Fierstein.
-
Hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil ..... and you'll never be a success at a cocktail party.
Anon
-
I'm a perfectionist, which I think is a mistake.
Michelle Shocked
-
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
-
To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.
Elizabeth Bibesco
-
“I felt very close to God.... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.”
― Armistead Maupin
-
I haven't read any of the autobiographies about me.
Elizabeth Taylor
-
I can't accept collective responsibility for the decision to commit Britain now to military action in Iraq without international agreement or domestic support.
Robin Cook
-
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger
-
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison
-
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe
-
My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?
Jean Harlow
-
Now I am an old hag, I get to play much more interesting characters.
Joan Greenwood
-
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
Michael Sandel
-
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things."
Zapp Brannigan
-
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-
“Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” - Howard Zinn
-
Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn't be here!
Rik Mayall
-
Well behaved women rarely make history
Eleanor Roosevelt
-
The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people, have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.
William Cobbett
-
If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
Max von Sydow
-
Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.
Clare Boothe Luce
-
Love is when he gives you a piece of your soul, that you never knew was missing.
Torquato Tasso
-
All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac
-
why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
-
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Charles Krauthammer
-
Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.
Diane Arbus
-
You can disagree without being disagreeable.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
-
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
Maxim Gorky
-
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
William Gibson
-
The end of science is not to prove a theory, but to improve mankind.
Manly Hall
-
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.
A.A. Milne
-
People are dying who have never died before
Donald Trump
18/03/20
-
Police arrested two kids yesterday, one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.
Tommy Cooper
-
People are dying who have never died before
Donald Trump
18/03/20
You couldn't make it up could you.
I said that.
-
So how many times do people jump off these tall buildings ?
Only once !
Walter
-
People are dying who have never died before
Donald Trump
18/03/20
Much though I'd love this to be true, according to Snopes it isn't:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-quote-never-died-before/
-
Much though I'd love this to be true, according to Snopes it isn't:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-quote-never-died-before/
Ah, shows one needs to check even when people you trust post stuff.
-
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
Anne Bradstreet
-
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
Raoul Vaneigem
-
It's good to shut up sometimes.
Marcel Marceau
-
I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.
Joan Crawford
-
Eeyore turned round angrily on the others and said, “Everybody crowds round so in this Forest. There’s no Space. I never saw a more Spreading lot of animals in my life, and all in the wrong places. Can’t you SEE that Christopher Robin wants to be alone? I’m going.”
~A.A.Milne
-
Among peoples who are geographically grouped together like the peoples of Europe there must exist a sort of federal link. It is this link which I wish to endeavour to establish.
Aristide Briand
-
"It's dead. All the world has died while I slept. This world belongs to somebody else whom I don't know. Perhaps to the Groke. It isn't made for Moomins." Tove Jansson
-
I've always found bad films more enjoyable than good ones.
Eric Idle
-
The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
Maimonides
-
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Rene Descartes
-
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
-
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Abraham Maslow
-
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas M. Butler
-
The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.
Doris Day
-
“Today was a Difficult Day,” said Pooh.
There was a pause.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Piglet.
“No,” said Pooh after a bit. “No, I don’t think I do.”
“That’s okay,” said Piglet, and he came and sat beside his friend.
“What are you doing?” asked Pooh.
“Nothing, really,” said Piglet. “Only, I know what Difficult Days are like. I quite often don’t feel like talking about it on my Difficult Days either.
“But goodness,” continued Piglet, “Difficult Days are so much easier when you know you’ve got someone there for you. And I’ll always be here for you, Pooh.”
And as Pooh sat there, working through in his head his Difficult Day, while the solid, reliable Piglet sat next to him quietly, swinging his little legs…he thought that his best friend had never been more right.
AA Milne
-
I saw this earlier posted by some irritating oik on FB - so very apt at the moment.
-
Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.
Maya Angelou
-
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
Plato
-
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.
Thomas Hobbes
-
We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting.
Rose Schneiderman
-
Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.”
-- Zoroaster
-
What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
William Wordsworth
-
“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”― John Wyndham
-
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
Emil Cioran
-
If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.
Tom Lehrer
-
Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.
Frances Perkins
-
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
Dorothy Allison
-
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
James Hillman
-
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.
Roger de Rabutin
-
A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
Robert Doisneau
-
A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.
A. Philip Randolph
-
All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Spike Milligan
-
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
Cynthia Ozick
-
No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
H.L.Mencken.
-
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
Jonathan Swift (often paraphrased as e.g. "You can't reason someone out of an opinion they weren't reasoned into.")
-
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
Andre Bazin
-
Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.
Fred Brooks
-
"If Scotland were to put today's fears into practice in 1390, we'd spend six hundred years in lock down".
- Professor Murray Pittock, Glasgow University,
This morning, BBC Radio Scotland.
-
Flattery and deceit are the darlings of great men, and so with these men spread the butter on thick, if you want to get something out of them, otherwise you'll come home to me with a full belly and an empty purse.
Pietro Aretino
-
The more a man knows, the more he forgives.
Catherine the Great
-
He knows so little and knows it so fluently.
Ellen Glasgow
-
I didn't know Ellen Glasgow had met Boris Johnson.
-
I didn't know Ellen Glasgow had met Boris Johnson.
I fear he comes from a long line.
-
The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.
Halldor Laxness
-
I fear he comes from a long line.
Not before he's snorted it.
-
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
A. C. Benson
-
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow
-
And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.
Thomas Reid
-
Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.
Mary Wollstonecraft
-
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Terry Pratchett
-
Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.
Thomas Beecham
-
What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen.
Alice B. Toklas
-
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
-
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
Jerome K. Jerome
-
It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.
Niccolo Machiavelli
-
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley
-
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
Soren Kierkegaard
-
The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.
Francis Quarles
-
We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are.
James M. Barrie
-
Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali
-
Cricket invented by the English, gives them a greater sense of eternity. (George Bernard Shaw).
ippy.
-
Cricket invented by the English, gives them a greater sense of eternity. (George Bernard Shaw).
ippy.
TOO RIGHT, that boring game seems to go on and on and on for the whole of eternity and well beyond. :o
-
TOO RIGHT, that boring game seems to go on and on and on for the whole of eternity and well beyond. :o
Found something more boring than cricket L R, I didn't think it possible and then Golf commentaries on the radio.
The golf one is now being used by doctors as an even better cure for insomnia so it's now replacing the cricket commentary.
Regards to you L R, ippy.
P S Don't forget L R, the gasometer's up and guess? That's right the gasometer's down.
-
I could have had class.
I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody instead of a bum, which I am let's face it I am!
Marlon Brando, from the film 'On the Waterfront'.
-
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
Yogi Berra
-
"if you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun" - Katherine Hepburn
-
I may not yet be as old as dirt, but dirt and I are starting to have an awful lot in common.
Stephen R. Donaldson
-
I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
Eric Morecambe
-
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter
-
I wasn't heroic because I was never in danger.
Nicholas Winton
-
I have published a proclamation: 'Forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgress against us.' I have ordered all citizens to return to their parishes to enjoy the benefits of this general amnesty.
Toussaint Louverture
-
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Alexander Pope
-
It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
Gerard De Nerval
-
If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!
Johnny Ball
-
Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished.
Elsa Maxwell
-
Why should I be worried about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!
Raymond Smullyan
-
I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.
Mary Wortley Montagu
-
I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.
Julia Ward Howe
-
I'm not homophobic. I mean, who cares? You know the state of the world, and you're only here for about 70, 80, years, so why do people worry about somebody's sex life? It's bonkers, really.
Anne Reid
-
Be fond of the man who jests at his scars, if you like; but never believe he is being on the level with you.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
-
"We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference, and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity. George Takei
-
Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.
Alfred Austin
-
Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.
Marilyn Monroe
-
When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free. --Barack Obama
-
When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
Frantz Fanon
-
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
-
Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Rosalind Russell
-
With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.
Adam Smith
-
I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I'm really thinking about.
Steven Wright
-
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
― James Baldwin
-
There can be a fundamental gulf of gracelessness in a human heart which neither our love nor our courage can bridge.
Patrick Campbell
-
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure… but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
Francis Chan
-
The internet's completely over.
Prince
-
Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows.
Charles Reade
-
When I felt rather overcome with my father's opposition, I said as firmly as I could, that I must have this or something else, that I could not live without some real work.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
-
"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?" -
Ernest J. Gaines
-
You can best fight any existing evil from the inside.
Hattie McDaniel
-
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
-
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?
Harriet Martineau
-
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
-
So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
When you get over the anxiety, you discover you should have been mad a long time ago.
Amy Clampitt
-
If any of you cry at my funeral, I'll never speak to you again!
Stan Laurel
-
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
-
Of two evils choose the prettier.
Carolyn Wells
-
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
-
The dead of midnight is the noon of thought.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
-
Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
-
"The beauty of standing up for your rights is others see you standing and stand up as well."- Cassandra Duffy
-
A hospital alone shows what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque
-
No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Alan Turing
-
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Ambrose Bierce
-
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
-
The most popular labor-saving device is still money.
Phyllis George
-
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
Lord Kelvin
-
Here are some more quotes from eminent scientist, William Thomson, (Lord Kelvin) physicist, whilst president of the Royal Society - "X-rays will prove to be a hoax" - "Radio has no future". on Marconi's experiments. - "I trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current".- writing to Niagara Falls Power Company.
-
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
Emma Goldman
-
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
Luigi Pirandello
-
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
Giacomo Leopardi
-
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
Czeslaw Milosz
-
They can't censor the gleam in my eye.
Charles Laughton
-
O wonder! O wonder! . . . The wonders are six: The hornbill complains without
being sick; the plant flourishes without nourishment; the water runs without being
urged; the earth is fixed without pegs; the heavens hold themselves up without
supports; in the firmament He (God) has sown the chick-peas of heaven. These
things fill me with wonder. Let us all pray to God! O God, who hast caused me to
pass the day cause me to pass the night well!
— The Waaqeffannaa song, in "The Folk-Literature of the *Galla."
(*The Oromo people of Ethiopia)
-
Marriage finally became acceptable to the churches when laws were established that could make it a means of depriving women of incomes and property, and making wives the equivalent of slaves.
Barbara G. Walker
-
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-
I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.
Edmonia Lewis
-
Every crowd has a silver lining.
P. T. Barnum
-
I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.
Frida Kahlo
-
We can have an understanding of yesterday, we can have a plan for today and we can have hope for forever, and that’s it.
Tom Hanks
-
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
David Hume
-
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” - James Baldwin
-
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
-
"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." H L Mencken
-
“After midnight, the moon set, and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.” Amelia Earhart.
-
“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” - Franz Kafka
-
"They aren't making mirrors like they used to" - Tallulah Bankhead
-
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
James Baldwin
-
"Nature provides exceptions to every rule."
Margaret Fuller
-
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory. - Mark Twain
-
"Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil." - Hannah Arendt
-
"To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way."
- E. M. Forster
-
"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful" - Mary Shelley,
-
“A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.”
-Gabriel García Márquez
-
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others" - Douglas Adams
-
Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance - Nathan Rutstein
-
He may have hair on his chest but, sister, so has Lassie - Cole Porter
-
"I've looked carefully at no deal. That outcome would be a failure of statecraft...." Boris Johnson to avoid doubt that is one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. In cae you thought it was another Boris Johnson altogether.
-
"Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by colour" - Unknown
-
So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
-
"Women’s rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg
-
Radio 4 today
Dominic Raab " we have all of the tools in the cabinet "
-
"It's an unavoidable truth. Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does."
Agnes Moorhead
-
"There are so many absurdities in our time that it is hard to assign first place." — Hannah Arendt
-
When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is still burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant. - Tennessee Williams - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
-
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." — Hannah Arendt
-
The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom. - Voltaire
-
G.K. Chesterton in 1911: “Satire has weakened in our epoch for several reasons, but chiefly, I think, because the world has become too absurd to be satirised.”
-
To which one can only reply:
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
-
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde
-
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." Doctor Who (scriptwriter - Chris Boucher)
-
We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. – Charles Bukowski
-
“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.” - Hubert Reeves
-
“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I
-
"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach."
Hitler
-
Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.
Hitler
-
"I can face the winter with calm. I'd been thinking of the winter as a horrid, wet, dreary time. Now I can see other things-crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well." A.A.Milne
-
A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy
Noel Coward
-
If you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed
Mark Twain
-
“Of course I am a feminist. I have been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side”.
Maya Angelou
-
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
-
Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas.
David Bowie
-
The more it
SNOWS-tiddely-pom
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
On
Snowing.
And nobody
KNOWS-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing
(by Winnie-the-Pooh)
~A.A.Milne
-
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
Miguel de Cervantes
-
"The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter what side they're on." Joseph Heller
-
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. — Philip K. Dick
-
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world. Eugene Debs
-
"During my administration, we did not fire a single bullet, we did not drop a single bomb and we did not launch a single missile. So we had an administration without any wars." Former President Jimmy Carter.
-
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”
Gradgrind, Hard Times - Charles Dickens
-
“Went to showbiz party. Met Jim Davidson, a fine comedian and a gentleman. Talked to all three of them.” Benny Hill
-
Without you, everything has a flatness. I feel as if I'm waiting for something all the time.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
-
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
Gabriel García Márquez
-
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” Saul Bellow
-
The only thing I envy in young people is their livers.
Brendan Behan
-
Who do I like best, men or women? I think it really depends on what for!
Joyce Grenfell
-
Behind every cloud is another cloud.
Judy Garland
-
If there is an idiot in power, it is because those who elected him are well represented.
- Mahathma Gandhi
-
I used to dread getting older because I thought I would not be able to do all the things I wanted to do, but now that I am older, I find I don't want to do them.
Nancy Astor, on her 80th birthday.
-
Everybody makes mistakes.
Intelligent people recognise when they do, apologise, and try hard not to do it again.
Fools can't see their mistakes.
Leonard Woodrow
-
A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead.
Ernest Bevin
-
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. - Albert Einstein
-
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noel Coward
-
One more drink and I'll be under the host.
Dorothy Parker (at a Cocktail Party)
-
Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty. - Mark Twain
-
“To right wing men, we are private property. To left wing men, we are public property.”
-Andrea Dworkin
-
"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future."
Robert A. Heinlein
-
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw.
-
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.
W B Yeats
-
'There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks
That insolent fiend…'
W B Yeats
-
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience
Adam Smith
-
Legend – a lie that has attained the dignity of age. H L Mencken
-
Think how stupid the average person is then realise half of them are stupider than that...George Carlin.
-
I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty - John Waters
-
“If you think your religion requires discrimination, you're probably misreading your faith.”
― DaShanne Stokes
-
I'd rather be a footballer missing a penalty than a Tory MP missing a soul - Dan Freeman
-
“The pain of ignorance can end. The pain of knowledge is forever”
― Reginald Hill
-
In an anti-intellectual society, people who know nothing about a complex subject are emboldened to ridicule experts who have spent a lifetime studying it.
George Kiser
-
“What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru
-
'Hell is Truth Seen Too Late.'
Thomas Hobbes
-
“Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”
― Rudyard Kipling
-
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley
-
“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
― Sarah Kendzior
-
‘Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood .
Richard Feynman
-
"You can also commit injustice by doing nothing." Marcus Aurelius
-
“Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.”
-- Jodie Foster
-
I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way.
— John Paul Jones
-
.
-
.
-
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
~James Baldwin
-
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
George Carlin
-
I would like to add, though it is a small digression, that I love reading (and re-reading) this thread.
-
I liked this one from George Takei ('Sulu' in the original Star Trek) on William Shatner's recent 10 minute jaunt into (or not) 'space';
"He’s boldly going where other people have gone before."
-
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius.
-
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx
-
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde
-
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
Desmond Tutu
-
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat
-
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman
-
"When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants" - Dennis Skinner
-
"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent" - Isaac Asimov
-
“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”
― Sydney J. Harris
-
They muddy the water to make it seem deep.
- Frederick Nietzsche
-
‘There comes a point where we’ve got to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream & find out why they’re falling in’
Desmond Tutu
-
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."
P J O'Rourke (RIP)
-
When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect. - Thomas Paine
-
'When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.' - Jean-Paul Sartre
-
"Phew what a scorcher" ~~ The Sun
-
"In himself, Jeremy Clarkson is nothing: a brief loud noise and a brief bad smell. The arse that emitted him, as I said yesterday, is Rupert Murdoch."
- Philip Pullman (on twitter)
-
"While people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others. Allow a friend to believe in a false prospectus or a false promise, and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all"
Christopher Hitchens
-
"The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible."
Alan Rickman
-
...
the Daily Mail, a paper that only exists to make nice people want to end their lives.
-
Rich people help themselves, poor people help each other
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/rich-poor-people-food-bank-homeless (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/rich-poor-people-food-bank-homeless) (I haven't read the article at all, for me this headline says enough.)
-
The nicest thing about quotes is that they give us a nodding acquaintance with the originator which is often socially impressive.
Kenneth Williams
-
“We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” Christopher Hitchens
-
"Asking for help is not giving up.
It is refusing to give up."
From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse on the beeb iPlayer
(I think is was the horse, but it could have been the mole. Frankly almost any quote from that animation could be a tought of as a quote of the day.)
-
"Asking for help is not giving up.
It is refusing to give up."
From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse on the beeb iPlayer
(I think is was the horse, but it could have been the mole. Frankly almost any quote from that animation could be a thought of as a quote of the day.)
-
.
-
“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
The Crucible
-
This milk's off
~~ Louis Pasteur.
-
Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy, too, is he who knows the rural gods, Pan and aged Silvanus and the sisterhood of the Nymphs.
Virgil's Georgics (via Melvyn Bragg / In Our Time)
-
..... But happy, too, is he who knows the rural gods,....
Virgil's Georgics (via Melvyn Bragg / In Our Time)
"Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes"
One quote I remember from my school Latin
Strange, I didn't learn the inimitable:
"Caesar adsum iam forte, Pompeius aderat" till much later.
-
"What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything."
Martin Amis
-
'We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Apart from pain. And maybe humiliation and obviously death. And failure. But apart from fear, pain and humiliation, failure and the unknown and death we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Who's with me?'
Arnold J Rimmer
-
‘he's a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship's entertainment…’
All's Well That Ends Well, Act III, Scene VI
-
.
-
"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit." - Noël Coward
-
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. ~Neil Postman
-
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
W. Somerset Maugham
-
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
-
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him
Jonathan Swift
-
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
A Man For All Seasons - Robert Bolt
-
Three bowls do I mix for the temperate: one to health, which they empty first; the second to love and pleasure; the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home.
The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence; the fifth to uproar; the sixth to drunken revel; the seventh to black eyes;
the eighth is the policeman's; the ninth belongs to biliousness; and the tenth to madness and the hurling of furniture.
Eubulus
-
“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective”. - Kurt Vonnegut
-
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin
-
Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it
Voltaire
-
"My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell overture without thinking of The Lone Ranger" Billy Connolly
-
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.
-
From the Dead Reckoning episode of Person of Interest
My dear, if you think I work for the government, I really must fire my tailor
-
BOB: These streets are ugly, but they have a kind of beauty.
TERRY: Working-class sentiment is the indulgence of working people created through football and rock and roll or people like you who moved out to the Elm Lodge Housing Estate at the earliest opportunity.
BOB: Well, I didn’t want my kids growing up on these streets.
The Likely Lads (Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais;)
-
.
Hark! Listen who swears,
Christopher Robin has fallen down stairs.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find an attribution for that.
-
UNCLE MORT: Reality? It’s all a con is that. If there were any reality in this world, there’d be no keg bitter, there’d be no Doberman pinschers, there’d be no bent collar studs, and United would hold the FA Cup in perpetuity.
I Didn’t Know You Cared, Peter Tinniswood
-
"There are so many absurdities in our time that it is hard to assign first place." — Hannah Arendt
-
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. ~Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum
-
.
-
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
Logan Pearsall Smith
-
"No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It's programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running...if too much escapes, it will die so it's desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day. Saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do these 'happy dances' to spectators. When the project was first launched it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later... (as you see it now in the video) it looks tired and hopeless as there isn't enough time to dance anymore.. It now only has enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked hydraulic fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time. Living its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out... (Figuratively and literally as its hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like it's actual blood).
"The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fluid in 2019, slowly came to a halt and died - And I am now tearing up over a friggin robot arm 😭 It was programmed to live out this fate and no matter what it did or how hard it tried, there was no escaping it. Spectators watched as it slowly bled out until the day that it ceased to move forever. Saying that 'this resonates' doesn't even do it justice imo. Created by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, they named the piece, 'Can't Help Myself'. What a masterpiece. What a message."
Extended interpretations: the hydraulic fluid in relation to how we kill ourselves both mentally and physically for money just in an attempt to sustain life, how the system is set up for us to fail on purpose to essentially enslave us and to steal the best years of our lives to play the game that the richest people of the world have designed. How this robs us of our happiness, passion and our inner peace. How we are slowly drowning with more responsibilities, with more expected of us, less rewarding pay-offs and less free time to enjoy ourselves with as the years go by. How there's really no escaping the system and that we were destined at birth to follow a pretty specific path that was already laid out before us. How we can give and give and give and how easily we can be forgotten after we've gone.. How we are loved and respected when we are valuable, then one day we aren't any longer and we become a burden...and how our young, free-caring spirit gets stolen from us as we get churned out of the broken system that we are trapped inside of. Can also be seen to represent the human life cycle and the fact that none of us make it out of this world alive. But also can act as a reminder to allow yourself to heal, rest and love with all of your heart. That the endless chase for 'more' isn't necessary in finding your own inner happiness.”
- James Kricked Parr
-
"Sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism"
Oscar Wilde
-
"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."
James Boswell
-
'There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.'
Aeschylus
-
The really unforgivable acts a
re committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.
Lois McMaster Bujold
-
Hawkeye:
War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy:
How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye:
Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy:
Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye:
Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
-
If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?
Marie Dressler
-
Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
He shall find no Fiend in Hell can match the fury of a disappointed Woman! - Scorned! slighted! dismissed without a parting Pang!
Colley Cibber
-
A Bevan,
That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
-
I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
Salvador Dali
-
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Denis Diderot
-
"I'm 19, with a wardrobe full of clothes. I've got everything to live for."
RIP John Byrne.
-
(From John Stuart Mill via) JeremyP
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing
-
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O'Brien
-
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
-
I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
-
But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.
Saki
-
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
Jean Genet
-
Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.
Sidney Hook
-
it is that a lot of little black marks on paper can bring a person who died nearly two hundred years ago into your room: bring him so close that you know him much better than you would have known him if you met him in the flesh. It is extraordinary and it is enlarging.
Diana Athill
-
Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.
Kenneth Rexroth
-
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
-
If you live long enough, you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.
I. F. Stone
-
The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.
Humphrey Bogart
-
People think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit, it’s the stuff we CAN understand. It’s cats that are complicated.
John Horton Conway
-
Careful grooming may take twenty years off a woman's age, but you can't fool a flight of stairs.
Marlene Dietrich
-
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
-
A door once opened may be stepped through in either direction.
Madame de Pompadour
-
How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.
Paul Bowles
-
You're always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.
Diane von Furstenberg
-
What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.
Mary Beard
-
It’s funny, how you realize things too late. Someone once said to me the tragedy about life is that you understand it backwards. But I don’t think so. I think the tragedy about life is there is no tragedy - you just don’t know it till you die.”
Marianne McDonald
-
When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.
Sergio Leone
-
Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.
C. L. R. James
-
Reality is for people that lack imagination.
Hayao Miyazaki
-
By going out of your mind, you come to your senses
Alan Watts
-
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
-
“Twelve strangers,” he interrupted, “twelve citizens picked off the street. In this world we’re unfortunate to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with the squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.”
Reginald Hill - The Woodcutter.
-
"Marxist science and Creation science have about as much validity as Bulgarian science, or April science, or Forty-Second Street science"
Maitland A. Edey & Donald C Johanson,
in "Blueprints".
-
Hope is a talent like any other.
Storm Jameson
-
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
My works are an imitation of my own past and present.
Barbara Hepworth
-
Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Lionel Stander
-
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
John Singer Sargent
-
Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed
Jay McInerney
-
My ambition is limited to the desire to capture something transient, and yet, this ambition is excessive.
Berthe Morisot
-
The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter.
Captain Beefheart
-
Ah! the clock is always slow; it is later than you think.
Robert W. Service
-
I have always believed that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Françoise Hardy
-
People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
A. A. Milne
-
I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.
Alexander Woollcott
-
The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another.
Buzz Aldrin
-
We will not regard any great power as necessarily right in a given dispute unless we are convinced of this, yet at the same time we will not view the great powers with perennial suspicion merely on account of their size, their wealth, or their nuclear potential. We will be friends of all, satellites of none.
Errol Barrow
-
Music must be seen, and dance must be heard
George Balanchine
-
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
Derek Walcott
-
I don't mind being listed alphabetically.
I do mind being treated alphabetically.
Maria Tallchief
-
'The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.'
Andrea Dworkin
-
Poverty - the one thing money can't buy
John Cooper Clarke
-
To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small. You've got to find your own doorway into things.
Paula Rego
-
'He is a fucking clown'
Nicola Sturgeon (about Boris Johnson).
-
Go on being uncommercial. There's a lot of money in it.
Jerome Kern
-
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
Colette
-
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Germaine Greer
-
"Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal, and it's gender.
For that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion."
Germaine Greer (85 today)
-
Money is sad shit
Richard Brautigan
-
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
Tallulah Bankhead
-
Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.
Muriel Spark
-
It gets tiring being a smartass.
Elaine Stritch
-
Perhaps the god who had made the Cat People intended them as a joke. They had schools, but no education; politicians but no government; people, but no personal integrity; faces, but no concept of face. One had to admit that their god had gone a little too far with his little joke.
Lao She
-
Comfort the troubled, and trouble the comfortable.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-
Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
Frank Muir
-
I like to think that laughter is a form of courage, a way of saying, 'I refuse to be beaten down by life.
Dennis Norden
-
I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier.
Chris Rock
-
My goal was to have one husband and seven children, but it turned out to be the other way around.
Lana Turner
-
The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.
Brendan Behan
-
The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.
Danny Blanchflower
-
Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.
Mary Quant
-
The truth will make you odd.
Judy Blume
-
Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.
Chuck Yeager
-
.
-
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Frederick Douglass
-
While attending a high-society party in New York, the hostess asked Princess Margaret politely how the Queen was keeping:
She replied:
Which one? My sister, my mother or my husband?
-
People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth.
George Mikes
-
The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.
Richard Ford
-
My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia
Barry Humphries
-
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Toni Morrison
-
Libraries are the pride of the city.
Amy Tan
-
It is through the tongue, the pen, and the press that truth is principally propagated.
Angelina Grimke
-
What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
Nina Simone
-
I feel a keen sympathy that all are akin. The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings.
Zitkála-Šá,
-
Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
W. E. B. Du Bois
-
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Judith Butler
-
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Judith Butler
Just give me a minute..............................................................................
-
In the end, this world will go under because of the stupidity of people.
George Harrison
-
All of man’s troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.
Vercors
-
This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
Bill Hicks
-
Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.
Marian Anderson
-
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
-
Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.
Gioachino Rossini
-
"We inhabit a world in which the answers to thorny moral questions are too often cast in black and white. Nuance is for losers: stray too far from your tribe and you’re accused of aligning yourself with rightwing religious fundamentalists or lefty woke warriors."
Sonia Sodha
-
It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them.
Martial
-
If you listen carefully, you get to hear everything you didn't want to hear in the first place.
Sholom Aleichem
-
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.
Emile Chartier/Alain
-
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
Hitler
-
I do not sing politics. I merely sing the truth.
Miriam Makeba
-
He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.
Hitler
-
Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be attributed to ignorance.
Penn Jillette
-
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
Hitler
-
The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don't understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
Hitler
-
Things have value Because somebody buys them, Because somebody pays money; If you can find a buyer, Even a lie is worth a thousand yen.
Kobo Abe
-
"They call you the Fiscal Drag Queen of British Politics," to Jeremy Hunt.
Amol Rajan
-
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Laurence J. Peter,
-
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
-
Looking at the earth from afar you realize it is too small for conflict and just big enough for co-operation.
Yuri Gagarin
-
Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops.
Kate Sheppard
-
"This is Sweet Sue saying good night, reminding all you daddies out there that every girl in my band is a virtuoso. And l intend to keep it that way."
- "Some Like It Hot" (1959)
-
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
-
Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points.
Percival Lowell
-
You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.
Quincy Jones
-
We live in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe - liberty, equality and justice for all - are encountering extraordinary challenges, ... But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
-
I'm offended by political jokes. Too often they get elected.
Henny Youngman
-
The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
William Gibson
-
Losing my mind sounds so pessimistic. I prefer the term winning my insanity.
Dane Cook
-
Without music you are all dead; with music you are alive. There
is nothing music can't do.
Lee “Scratch” Perry
-
Do you know what a Palmist once said to me? She said: will you let go!
Vivian Stanshall
-
I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.
If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!
Arthur Rimbaud
-
A line one of my kid's friends heard recently in South Africa that made me laugh:
"He's more confident than a mediocre white man..."
-
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
Ellen Glasgow
-
What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.
Dominique de Menil
-
How you imagine the world determines how you live in it.
David Suzuki
-
Have you ever thought about registering as a sex offender just so your friends won't bring their kids over to your house?
Doug Stanhope
-
Unfortunately civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
Sandra Day O'Connor
-
Closest to the truth are those who deal lightly with it because they know it is inexhaustible.
Golo Mann
-
Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
Mario Vargas Llosa
-
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
Eric Idle
-
We all must live our lives always feeling, always thinking the moment has arrived.
Tracy Chapman
-
The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.
Cesar Chavez
-
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.
Gil Scott-Heron
-
Follow your heart but take your brain with you.
Alfred Adler
-
The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.
Doris Day
-
If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look behind you and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!
Maya Angelou
-
Nostalgia is the "misty, water-coloured memories - of the way things weren't."
Anon.
-
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker T. Washington
-
You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.
Leonora Carrington
-
There must be progress, certainly. But we must ask ourselves what kind of progress we want, and what price we want to pay for it. If, in the name of progress, we want to destroy everything beautiful in our world, and contaminate the air we breathe, and the water we drink, then we are in trouble.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
-
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
Emil Cioran
-
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness
Charles Baudelaire
-
We just have to convince other people that they have power. This is what they can do by participating to make change, not only in their community, but many times changing in their own lives. Once they participate, they get their sense of power.
Dolores Huerta
-
'It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.'
David Hume
-
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
Leo Rosten
-
Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old saggy cloth cat. Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams, but Emily loved him.
Oliver Postgate
-
Attempted modifications of an essential evil always fail.
Josephine Butler
-
A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society
B.R. Ambedkar
-
"The Vikings ancestors arrived in America before Christopher Columbus, but they are gone now. Fortunately for everyone, otherwise the whole world would speak Icelandic, which is a very complicated and very difficult language"
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir
-
Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light
Spike Milligan
-
It is now deeply unconservative to try to stop people dying unnecessarily early.
John Crace
-
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
-
Nations which are pleased to term themselves civilized, have one sort of faith which they hold to one another, and another sort which they entertain towards people less advanced in refinement. The faith which they entertain towards the latter, is very often treachery, in the vocabulary of the civilized.
James McCune Smith
-
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
Dudley Moore
-
If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.
Joan Miro
-
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.
Karl Kraus
-
We are not fighting against men, but against outdated opinions and customs.
Kartini
-
It is imperfection - not perfection - that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
-
What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.
William Shakespeare
-
The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.
Bridget Riley
-
The only thing better than singing is more singing.
Ella Fitzgerald
-
I've always loved high style in low company.
Anita Loos
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All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
Harper Lee
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The days of the future stand in front of us Like a line of candles all alight Golden and warm and lively little candles.
C.P. Cavafy
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Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
George Carlin
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My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'
Claude Shannon
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It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller
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It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
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A problem for inclusion is that it supposes that everyone wants to be included.
Togetherness is a lovely thing.
So is autonomy for The Cat That Walks Alone.
Not all creatures are at home in a hive.
Alison Moyet
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The reminder that there are people who have worse troubles than you is not an effective pain-killer.
Mary Astor
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An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
Agatha Christie.
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I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt.
Eric Sykes
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I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it
Nellie Bly
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Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.
Martha C. Nussbaum
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It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Another gem from Tagore:
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade: it makes the hand bleed that uses it.
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Fascists are pretending
to be humanitarians,
like cannibals on a health kick
eating only vegetarians.
Roger McGough
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If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
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Liberal: a radical with two kids and a mortgage.
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The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.
Glenda Jackson
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It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
Ariel Durant
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We need to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed. It's OK to say, "I don't know."
Richard P. Feynman
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It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
Armistead Maupin
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Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said that less than one-half day's cost of the Civil War could have purchased the freedom of all the slaves in Delaware.
The Civil War cost the two sides a total of $6.6 billion in 1860s dollars, enough to buy the freedom of all the slaves at their 1860 market value, give each slave family 40 acres and a mule and make $3.5 billion in reparations to former slaves in lieu of 100 years of back wages.
Claudia Goldin
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The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.
Brian Eno
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
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We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.
Dennis Potter
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Come, you pack of morphine addicts; come to kill us in our own land, and I will await you standing strong at the head of my patriotic soldiers, not caring about how many of you there are; bear in mind that when this happens, the destruction of your greatness will shake the Capitol in Washington, with your blood reddening the white sphere crowning your famous White House, the cavern where you plot your crimes.
Augusto Sandino
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I have come to believe that the best kind of walk, or journey, is the one in which you have no particular destination when you set out.
Ruskin Bond
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It is easy to cut down the tree of liberty, but not so easy to restore it to life.
Toussaint Louverture
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Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.
Elizabeth Fry
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“People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.” - Martha Gellhorn.
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If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes
Sun Ra
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Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
Margaret Fuller
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People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
Bob Dylan
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We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.
Rosario Castellanos
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Anybody can and should dance... It's good for the body and the spirit.
Isadora Duncan
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I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy
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We cannot build the future by avenging the past.
T. H. White
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Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.
Agnès Varda
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The truth is simple. If it was complicated, everyone would understand it.
Walt Whitman
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Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.
Marilyn Monroe
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He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.
Carol Shields
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There is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
James Hutton
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When it comes to sex, the most important six inches are the ones between the ears.
Ruth Westheimer
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We do not see the lens through which we look.
Ruth Benedict
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There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.
Isaiah Berlin
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"Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
~George Carlin
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There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
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A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
Eric Hobsbawm
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I'd rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid.
Hattie McDaniel
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Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.
Millicent Fawcett
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It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.
Harriet Martineau (1837)
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Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?
James Clerk Maxwell
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So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.
Simon Callow
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To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.
Idries Shah
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It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.
James Weldon Johnson
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I believe in a set of values I cannot live by.
Isabella Rossellini
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What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?
Pauline Kael
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Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
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We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known.
Françoise Sagan
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Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Erich Maria Remarque
-
.
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Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.
Anna Akhmatova
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self-esteem, n. An erroneous appraisal.
Ambrose Bierce
-
.
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Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'
Pearl S. Buck
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If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.
Emma Goldman
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Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.
Muhammad Yunus
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Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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You aim at all the things you have been told that stardom means the rich life, the applause, the parties cluttered with celebrities. Then you find that you have it all. And it is nothing, really nothing. It is like a drug that lasts just a few hours, a sleeping pill. When it wears off, you have to live without its help.
Susan Hayward
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I always think he looks like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it.
Anna Soubry (one of the few good Tories, when she was one - she now supports Labour) on Nigel Farage,
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It's hard to keep on being civil when they ask you such annoying questions.
Olivia de Havilland
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We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.
Thurgood Marshall
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I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.
Franz Kafka
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Very few among us are noble, or even mature, in all parts of our nature at the same time.
Gertrude Lawrence
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“Calling bigotry an opinion is like calling arsenic a flavor.”
Attributed to Jack Cameron.
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Music seems to be the bridge over the gulf between form and the formless.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.
Frida Kahlo
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For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.
Marc Chagall
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Old ideas die hard. We've had thousands of years of women having almost no rights. Parts of the world are in a struggle toward very basic human rights for women, and most of the world isn't even there yet. And it's going to take a long time to change these attitudes.
Kathe Kollwitz
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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld
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One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
Nikola Tesla
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As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.
James McNeill Whistler
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Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Pablo Neruda
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
Wole Soyinka
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I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.
Ingmar Bergman
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“I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, and yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.”
― Frédéric Chopin
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We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help free the other half.
Emmeline Pankhurst
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Friedrich Nietzche: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”
-
Egotism - usually just a case of mistaken nonentity.
Barbara Stanwyck
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I've tried Buddhism, Scientology, Numerology, Transcendental Meditation, Qabbala, t'ai chi, feng shui and Deepak Chopra but I find straight gin works best.
Phyllis Diller
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Fools multiply when wise men are silent.
Nelson Mandela
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I suppose I don't hear things, but I listen, if you know what I mean. And there is a big difference between hearing and listening. So it's like a conversation, you know. When you speak to someone, it's one on one, and that's exactly how I play.
Evelyn Glennie
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Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger
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Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
Marshall McLuhan
-
The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funksmanship.
George Clinton
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
- Isaac Asimov
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Don't talk to me about writing; you couldn't write "fuck" on a dusty Venetian blind.
Coral Browne
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Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?
Amelia Earhart
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"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
H L Mencken
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Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.
Elias Canetti
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A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for.
Gracie Allen
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The danger of any new party at a time of disillusion with the old parties, is that it becomes all things to all men.
Shirley Williams
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So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Beatrix Potter
-
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
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Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us.
Emily Bronte
-
How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?
John Searle
-
Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe.
Maria Mitchell
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Most of the sex I've seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.
Myrna Loy
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The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.
Maggie Kuhn
-
Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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When you state we are too big, too small, too old, too ugly, too mannish, too irrelevant blah, blah, blah, do bear in mind we hold no ambition to be some random splutter’s wank-standard and neither a role model for the puddle-deep.
Alison Moyet on being a woman (Twitter today)
I keep reading "random splutter's wank-standard" and then giggling fairly uncontrollably.
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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
Conrad Aiken
-
I am prepared to sacrifice every so-called privilege I possess in order to have a few rights.
Inez Milholland
-
You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.
Garrison Keillor
-
We've probably had this before but it is appropriate:
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
Isaac Asimov
-
No one can avoid a challenge in life without breeding regret, and regret is the arsenic of life.
Esther Williams
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What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Jean Piaget
-
...it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated.
Jorge Amado
-
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
Steve Wozniak
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He held up a book then. “I'm going to read it to you for relax.” “Does it have any sports in it?” “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.” “Sounds okay,” I said and I kind of closed my eyes.
William Goldman
-
He was the patron saint of quality footwear.
David St Hubbins
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When you can use dirty words in every situation with everyone, that's a real big liberation.
Lina Wertmuller
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I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
Edna Ferber
-
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Charles Bukowski
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Well behaved women do not make history.
Mae West
-
One can argue that in the context of history a few years do not matter. But we live in an age in which every moment counts heavily and the price of delay is human lives.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
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Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
Coco Chanel
-
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
Salvatore Quasimodo
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When I started, they told me I only needed 3 chords and the truth... It turned out I could manage with 2 and some vague ideas.
Joe Strummer
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Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.
Dorothy Parker
-
“I ain’t draft dodging. I ain’t burning no flag. I ain’t running to Canada. I’m staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I’ve been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people.
If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for me right here at home. “
- Muhammad Ali
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We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.
Will Cuppy
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If you love someone who is ruining his or her life because of faulty thinking, and you don't do anything about it because you are afraid of what others might think, it would seem that rather than being loving, you are in fact being heartless.
William Wilberforce
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To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. - Federico Garcia Lorca
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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
Martin Amis
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Some leaders are born women.
Geraldine Ferraro
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. . . personal soundness is not an absence of problems but a way of reacting to them.
Donald M. MacKinnon
-
.
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The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies
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People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.
Temple Grandin
-
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." Groucho Marx
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"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."
James Boswell
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"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
H L Mencken
-
.
-
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."
Aristotle
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“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
― James Crumley
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Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.
Billy Connolly
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"My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species" - Joni Mitchell
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"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Carl Sagan (30 years ago)
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"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Carl Sagan (30 years ago)
And another from him
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan
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.
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Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
-
.
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“If you want an experienced public servant, vote for me. But if you want to believe a bunch of crazy promises about garbagemen cleaning your gutters and waxing your car, then by all means vote for this sleazy lunatic.”
The Simpsons
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The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
Antonio Gramsci
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The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
Antonio Gramsci
I cannot help be reminded of this, yet again
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
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"a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5