Quote for the Day

[Nearly Sane]

“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

[jeremyp]

This milk's off

~~ Louis Pasteur.

[Udayana]

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)

[Dicky Underpants]

..... 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.

[Nearly Sane]

"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

[Nearly Sane]

'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

[Nearly Sane]

‘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

[Nearly Sane]

.

[Nearly Sane]

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit." - Noël Coward

[Aruntraveller]

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

[Aruntraveller]

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

W. Somerset Maugham

[Nearly Sane]

"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

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Aruntraveller]

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective”. - Kurt Vonnegut

[Nearly Sane]

“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

[Nearly Sane]

Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it


Voltaire

[Aruntraveller]

"My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell overture without thinking of The Lone Ranger"  Billy Connolly

[Nearly Sane]

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.

[Nearly Sane]

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

[Nearly Sane]

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;)

[jeremyp]

.

Hark! Listen who swears,
Christopher Robin has fallen down stairs.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find an attribution for that.

[Nearly Sane]

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