Quote for the Day

[Nearly Sane]

"I can excuse everything but boredom. Boring people don't have to stay that way."

Hedy Lamarr

[Aruntraveller]

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

[Nearly Sane]

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Neil Gaiman

[Nearly Sane]

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

Kurt Vonnegut

[Nearly Sane]

"The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

[Nearly Sane]

"You've got to vote for someone. It's a shame, but it's got to be done."

Whoopi Goldberg

[Nearly Sane]

"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

[Nearly Sane]

"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

[Aruntraveller]

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?)

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.

Lev Vygotsky

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

Dick Cavett

[Robbie]

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

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

[SteveH]

Some things are true, even though the Daily Telegraph says they are true.

George Orwell.

[SteveH]

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

George Orwell

[Aruntraveller]

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

[SteveH]

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.

[SteveH]

"Bollock-faced foghorn of ignorance."
Phillip Pullman on Nigel Fartage.

"Nicotine stained man-frog."
The New European's standard description of N.F.

[Nearly Sane]

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

George Eliot

[Enki]

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Bertrand Russell

[Aruntraveller]

"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.

[Robbie]

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