Dean's Den: My Favorite Quotations

My Favorite Quotations

"I hate quotations." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's kind of amazing to notice how many people these days like to put treasured quotations up on their personal web sites. It's as if each of us is publishing our own personal "good book," our own sacred collection of wisdom and insight.

The way I see this, in the old days we settled for a book of wisdom written by a committee, and naturally it was full of mistakes and nonsense. But in the future human truth will spread like wildfire in a much more reliable way, because each of us will have taken the responsibility to help carry from hand to hand only those insights we have personally verified.

Anyway, here are some of my own favorites for you to test drive.

Animal Liberation
Cats, Reigning and Otherwise
Deft Definitions
Eye Openers
Folly
Fortune Cookies
Growth
Humility
Humor
Movies and Television

Philosophy Jokes
Poetry and Song
Proverbs
Quayle Eggs
Retorts and Paraphrases
Sarcasm
Science
Technology
T-Shirts I'd Like to See
Yogi Berries

NOTE: I have sprinkled a few of my own quotes in the following collection, mostly because I could get away with it. Some of them were extracted from larger texts, but some were always intended to be one-sentence essays. Since I have never heard of anyone treating the quotation as a literary form before, it may be appropriate at this moment to remember the words of that much misunderstood rebel of yesteryear:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand,
more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

P. S. I also invented the term dinosaurabilia.

Jeremy Bentham:: The question is not can they reason, not can they talk, but can they suffer? [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]
Henry Beston:: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and err greatly. For the animal should not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. [from The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928), which Rachel Carson once described as the only influence on her writing.]
Leonardo Da Vinci:: The day will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]
Ghandi:: If animals could speak, they would state a case against mankind that would stagger the imagination.
Dean Hannotte:: All of us, from pet owners to sociobiologists, describe animals as having "lovely" or "fierce" or "gentle" personalities. Isn't it time we agreed that anything with a personality is a person? And if corporations can be "persons" just to enjoy legal protections, shouldn't we grant legal protections to fellow creatures that can actually think and feel? If IBM is a person, why isn't my cat?
George Bernard Shaw:: I wouldn't eat meat even if it were good for me.
Isaac Bashevis Singer:: In our behavior towards animals, all men are Nazis.
Mark Twain:: I believe I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

[unknown]:: Albert Schweitzer, a lefty, wrote prescriptions with his right arm because his cat Sizi preferred to sleep on his left arm. [from Pet House Magazine, 4/94, page 39]
[unknown]:: Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.
[unknown]:: I got rid of my husband. The cat was allergic.
[unknown]:: My husband said it was him or the cat . . . I miss him sometimes.
[unknown]:: No heaven wil not ever Heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me. [epitaph on a pet cemetery]
[unknown]:: There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.
[unknown]:: There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.
[unknown]:: Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.
[unknown]:: Whenever mice laugh at a cat, there is a hole nearby. [proverb]
Ellen Perry Berkeley:: As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.
Mary Bly:: Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later.
Colette:: Time spent with cats is never wasted.
Colonial American proverb:: You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.
Missy Dizick:: Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.
English proverb:: In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.
George Freedley:: Four little Persians, but one only looked in my direction. I extended a tentative finger and two soft paws clung to it. There was a contented sound of purring, I suspect on both our parts. [American writer]
Bruce Graham:: Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will pee on your computer.
Joseph Wood Krutch:: Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.
Joseph Wood Krutch:: Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
Ernest Menaul:: The cat has too much spirit to have no heart.
Dave Platt:: Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.
Faith Resnick:: People that hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life.
Paul Rosenfels:: Dogs believe that they are an inferior kind of human. Cats believe that people are an inferior form of cat.
Albert Schweitzer:: There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Hippolyte Taine:: I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Mark Twain:: Dear Mrs. Patterson:
The contents of your letter are very pleasant and very welcome, and I thank you for them, sincerely. If I can find a photograph of my 'Tammany' and her kittens, I will enclose it in this. One of them likes to be crammed into a cornerpocket of the billiard table -- which he fits as snugly as does a finger in a glove and then he watches the game (and obstructs it) by the hour, and spoils many a shot by putting out his paw and changing the direction of a passing ball. Whenever a ball is in his arms, or so close to him that it cannot be played upon without risk of hurting him, the player is privileged to remove it to any one of three spots that chances to be vacant. . . .
Jeff Valdez:: Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

[unknown]:: A Freudian slip is when you mean one thing and say your mother.
[unknown]:: A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't.
[unknown]:: A good pun is its own reword.
[unknown]:: A leading authority is someone lucky who guessed right.
[unknown]:: An actor is someone who, once he learns to fake sincerity, has got it made.
[unknown]:: An enonomist is a man who measures the value of love by the price of prostitution.
[unknown]:: Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. [spoken by Mickey Mouse]
[unknown]:: Astronomy is the study of telescopes. [as quoted on page 28 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: Diplomacy is the art of repeating "Nice doggie" to a Pit Bull while searching for a rock.
[unknown]:: Humorists are just philosophers who deal with one main mystery: "Is it me, or what?" [The 1999 Book Lover's Calendar (Workman Publishing)]
[unknown]:: Psychoanalysis is the disease for which the only cure is more psychoanalysis.
[unknown]:: Psychology is the science that discusses what everyone knows in terms that no one understands.
Joey Adams:: A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Fred Allen:: Committee -- a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
Arthur C. Clarke:: My favorite definition of an intellectual: "Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence." [from 3001: The Final Odessey, page 262]
Georges de Buffon:: Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
Miguel de Unamuno:: Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Abba Eban:: A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.
Albert Einstein:: Being a genius is just knowing what you're not very good at, and avoiding that subject.
Albert Einstein:: Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein:: Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.
Albert Einstein:: Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. [as quoted on page 52 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Albert Einstein:: Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. THAT's relativity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: Man is a god in ruins.
Gustave Flaubert:: Language is a cracked kettle on which we tap out crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Henry Ford:: Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.
Max Gluckman:: A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Ernie Kovacs:: Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.
John Lennon:: Life is what happens to us while we're making other plans.
Plutarch:: The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
Henri Poincaré:: Sociology: the science with the most methods and the fewest results.
Sir Karl Popper:: Science is merely common sense writ large.
Sir Karl Popper:: Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification. [Observer (London, 1 Aug. 1982)]
Stolberg:: An expert is a person who avoids the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.
Jonathan Swift:: Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. [as quoted on page 9 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Henry David Thoreau:: Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one. [On the Duty of Civil Disobedience]
Alvin Toffler:: One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. [as quoted on page 75 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Paul Valery:: Existence is no more than a flaw in the perfection of non-existence. [as quoted on page 12 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Gore Vidal:: Psychiatry lies somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullability.
Gore Vidal:: To one who locates psychiatry somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullibility, the cold-blooded desire to make money by giving one's fellows (at best) obvious advice and (at worst) notions even sillier than the ones which made them suffer smacks of Schadenfreude.
Voltaire:: The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.
H. G. Wells:: Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
William Whewell:: We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist. [1840, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Oscar Wilde:: What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. [Lady Windemere's Fan]

[unknown]:: A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
[unknown]:: A friend in need is a pest indeed.
[unknown]:: A guy walked into a bar. He was treated for minor injuries.
[unknown]:: A little girl after hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time, asked, "What do we do now?" [as quoted on page 56 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: A little greed can get you lots of stuff.
[unknown]:: A man who smiles when things go wrong knows who to blame.
[unknown]:: A manuscript, like a fetus, is never improved by showing it to somebody before it is completed.
[unknown]:: A steak a day keeps the cows dead.
[unknown]:: Adolescence is when children start bringing up their parents.
[unknown]:: After all is said and done, usually more is said.
[unknown]:: After things have gone from bad to worse, the cycle will repeat.
[unknown]:: All general statements are false.
[unknown]:: All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
[unknown]:: All that glitters has a high refractive index.
[unknown]:: All the world's a stage . . . most of us are just stagehands.
[unknown]:: All things being equal, you lose.
[unknown]:: All true wisdom is found on T-shirts.
[unknown]:: An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."
The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish.
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.
The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, Senor."
The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and, with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC, where you will run your expanding enterprise."
The Mexican fisherman asked, "But Senor, how long will this all take?" To which the American replied, "15-20 years."
"But what then, Senor?"
The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."
"Millions, Senor? Then what?"
The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
[unknown]:: An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.
[unknown]:: Anything that kills you makes you . . . well, dead.
[unknown]:: As easy as 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841.
[unknown]:: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, let the machine get it.
[unknown]:: Atheists have no invisible means of support.
[unknown]:: Avoid reality at all costs.
[unknown]:: Back off, you jerks. This mother isn't going nowhere. [attributed to a Russian man blocking a Soviet tank in August of 1991, from the book Eyewitness by Vladimir Posner]
[unknown]:: Be alert. The world needs more lerts.
[unknown]:: Behind every successful man stands a woman waiting for his job.
[unknown]:: Being politically correct means always having to say you're sorry.
[unknown]:: Being superstitious brings bad luck.
[unknown]:: Beware of sheep in sheep's clothing.
[unknown]:: Beware the fury of a patient woman.
[unknown]:: Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
[unknown]:: Chicken little only has to be right once.
[unknown]:: Cleanliness is next to clean-limbed, according to Webster's.
[unknown]:: Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
[unknown]:: Common sense isn't.
[unknown]:: Complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers.
[unknown]:: Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons. [Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949]
[unknown]:: Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog?
[unknown]:: Don't count your checks before they're cashed.
[unknown]:: Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep 'till noon.
[unknown]:: Don't judge a book by its movie.
[unknown]:: Don't use a big word where a diminutive word will suffice.
[unknown]:: Drag the Joneses down to your level. It's cheaper.
[unknown]:: Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy. [Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859]
[unknown]:: Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? [as quoted on page 8 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: Eagles fly; but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.
[unknown]:: Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends.
[unknown]:: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they may cancel your VISA.
[unknown]:: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
[unknown]:: Eternal nothingness is fine if you're dressed for it.
[unknown]:: Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
[unknown]:: Even if you're paranoid, maybe they really ARE after you.
[unknown]:: Every silver lining has a cloud.
[unknown]:: Everyone loves a moose. Some just don't know it.
[unknown]:: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
[unknown]:: Fool-proof implies a finite number of fools.
[unknown]:: For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
[unknown]:: For every problem there is a simple solution, and it's always wrong.
[unknown]:: Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.
[unknown]:: Get the facts first, THEN panic!
[unknown]:: Get thee down. Be thou funky.
[unknown]:: Given a conflict, Murphy's law supercedes Newton's.
[unknown]:: God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them!
[unknown]:: God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day.
[unknown]:: Golf scores are directly proportional to the number of witnesses.
[unknown]:: Good generally conquers evil. Unless, of course, good is stupid.
[unknown]:: Gravity always wins.
[unknown]:: Hard work never killed anybody . . . but why take chances?
[unknown]:: He is the spectator of all musical time and existence, to whom it is not of the smallest importance whethor a thing be new or old, so long as it is true. [a music critic on J. S. Bach, quoted in "Civilization" on page 226]
[unknown]:: He who throws mud loses ground.
[unknown]:: He's dead, Jim. You grab his wallet, I'll grab his tricorder.
[unknown]:: Heck was created for those who refuse to believe in Gosh.
[unknown]:: Heisenburg probably rules.
[unknown]:: Hellrung's Law: If you wait, it will go away.
[unknown]:: Here lies Jan Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble Cutter. This monument was erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monuments of this same style are two hundred and fifty dollars. [gravestone inscription]
[unknown]:: High explosives are applicable where truth and logic fail.
[unknown]:: Hire a teenager while they still know it all.
[unknown]:: Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
[unknown]:: Honour thy error as hidden intention.
[unknown]:: I had an IQ test. The results came back negative.
[unknown]:: If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution.
[unknown]:: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
[unknown]:: If at first you don't succeed -- give up! No use being a damn fool.
[unknown]:: If at first you don't succeed . . . forget skydiving.
[unknown]:: If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
[unknown]:: If hackers ran the world, there'd be no war -- lots of accidents, maybe.
[unknown]:: If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys. [bumper sticker]
[unknown]:: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
[unknown]:: If you aren't part of the solution, you're a precipitate.
[unknown]:: If you can remember the '60s, then you weren't there.
[unknown]:: If you can still hear the music, it's not loud enough!
[unknown]:: If you can't dazzle them with dexterity, feed them a crock!
[unknown]:: If you can't laugh at yourself, make fun of other people.
[unknown]:: If you can't speak softly, just use the stick.
[unknown]:: If you think nobody cares, miss a couple of payments.
[unknown]:: In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
[unknown]:: In case of nuclear war, prayer in schools will be okay.
[unknown]:: Inside every short man is a tall man doubled over in pain.
[unknown]:: It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
[unknown]:: It is interesting to speculate how different the world must have looked before Thomas Gray coined the word 'picturesque' in 1740 or before Whewell coined 'scientist' in the 19th century, or before Shakespeare coined the words 'assasination', 'disgraceful', or 'lonely'. [as quoted on page 67 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: It's a love story. No one's ahead. [as quoted on page 20 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: It's not an optical illusion, it just looks that way.
[unknown]:: It's only fun if you can get in trouble.
[unknown]:: Join the army, meet interesting people, and kill them.
[unknown]:: Know thyself. If you need help, call the CIA.
[unknown]:: Langsam's Law: Everything depends.
[unknown]:: Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs louder.
[unknown]:: Laugh and the world thinks you're an idiot.
[unknown]:: Life is cheap. It's the accessories that kill you.
[unknown]:: Life is essentially meaningless yet we all fear death.
[unknown]:: Life is unsure, always eat your dessert first.
[unknown]:: Live long enough to be a problem to your kids.
[unknown]:: Love thine enemies . . . it really pisses them off.
[unknown]:: LSD melts your mind, not in your hand.
[unknown]:: Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce.
[unknown]:: Moderation is good, but boring.
[unknown]:: Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.
[unknown]:: Monday is the root of all evil.
[unknown]:: Money can't buy everything. That's what credit cards are for.
[unknown]:: Money is the root of all wealth.
[unknown]:: Money talks . . . but all mine ever says is good-bye.
[unknown]:: Most people deserve each other.
[unknown]:: Murphy was an optimist.
[unknown]:: Murphy's Law only fails when you try to demonstrate it.
[unknown]:: Never draw fire; it irritates the people around you.
[unknown]:: Never hit a man when he's down. He may get back up again.
[unknown]:: Never hit a man with glasses; hit him with your fist.
[unknown]:: Never put off to tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
[unknown]:: Never tell them what you wouldn't want to do.
[unknown]:: No job is so simple that is can't be done wrong.
[unknown]:: No one is listening until you make a mistake.
[unknown]:: Nobody gets out of the Bermuda Triangle. Not even for lunch.
[unknown]:: Nostalgia is okay but not what it used to be.
[unknown]:: Nothing is so smiple that it can't be screwed up.
[unknown]:: On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten.
[unknown]:: On the other hand, you have different fingers.
[unknown]:: One good turn gets most of the blankets.
[unknown]:: Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune time.
[unknown]:: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?
[unknown]:: Patience will come to he who waits for it.
[unknown]:: People from my country believe -- and rightly so -- that the only thing separating man from the animals is mindless superstition and pointless ritual. ["Latka Gravis," from an episode of TAXI]
[unknown]:: People who have their feet planted firmly on the ground often have difficulty getting their pants off. [as quoted on page 59 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: People who live in glass houses . . . shouldn't.
[unknown]:: People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
[unknown]:: Practice makes perfeckt.
[unknown]:: Procrastination means never having to say you're sorry.
[unknown]:: Rap is to music as Etch-A-Sketch is to art.
[unknown]:: Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
[unknown]:: Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.
[unknown]:: Reality is an illusion created by alcoholic deficiency.
[unknown]:: Relax. Only dread one day at a time.
[unknown]:: Religions change, but beer and wine remain.
[unknown]:: Remember: 'i' before 'e', except in Budweiser.
[unknown]:: Resistance is useless! (If <1 ohm)
[unknown]:: Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm a schitzophrenic, and so am I.
[unknown]:: Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it.
[unknown]:: Sex is nobody's business but the three people involved.
[unknown]:: Silence is one great art of conversation.
[unknown]:: Skydiving . . . good 'till the last drop.
[unknown]:: Smile, it makes people wonder what you're thinking.
[unknown]:: So many cheques, so little money.
[unknown]:: Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.
[unknown]:: Some drink at the fountain of knowledge . . . others just gargle.
[unknown]:: Some women get excited about nothing and then marry him.
[unknown]:: Start off every day with a smile and get it over with.
[unknown]:: Statistics show every two minutes another statistic is created.
[unknown]:: Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.
[unknown]:: Take 20 aspirins and you'll feel better, if you wake up.
[unknown]:: Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.
[unknown]:: Taxation WITH representation isn't so hot, either.
[unknown]:: The bigger they are, the harder they hit.
[unknown]:: The certain proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that no one has bothered to make contact with us.
[unknown]:: The colder the X-Ray table, the more of your body is required on it.
[unknown]:: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible. [A Yale University management prof. in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)]
[unknown]:: The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they'll be when you kill them.
[unknown]:: The Earth is like a grain of sand, only bigger.
[unknown]:: The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
[unknown]:: The light at the end of a tunnel may be an oncoming train.
[unknown]:: The pen is mightier than the sword, until it runs out of ink.
[unknown]:: The problem with being too efficient is that once you've demonstrated the ability to walk on water, every SOB wants you to trot across the lake on an errand.
[unknown]:: The problem with reality is the lack of background music.
[unknown]:: The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
[unknown]:: The real world is a special case.
[unknown]:: The reward for a job well done is more work.
[unknown]:: The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line.
[unknown]:: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
[unknown]:: The trouble with getting a life is making the payments.
[unknown]:: The Two Rules of Success: 1. Don't tell everything you know.
[unknown]:: The worst thing about censorship is [deleted by censorship bereau].
[unknown]:: There are few problems that can't be solved with high explosives.
[unknown]:: There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can't.
[unknown]:: There are two times I feel stress -- day and night.
[unknown]:: There is more room in your head for thoughts than thoughts in your head for room.
[unknown]:: This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. [Western Union internal memo, 1876]
[unknown]:: This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown away with great force. [in a book review]
[unknown]:: Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it.
[unknown]:: Those who live in stone houses shouldn't throw glass.
[unknown]:: Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.
[unknown]:: Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. [Example given in many artificial intelligence textbooks to show why simple sentences are hard to parse, especially for computers]
[unknown]:: Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.
[unknown]:: To err is human, to forgive is against company policy.
[unknown]:: To err is human. And stupid.
[unknown]:: To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.
[unknown]:: Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.
[unknown]:: Trust in God, but lock your car.
[unknown]:: Two doctors from Derby reported in 1981 about a woman, blind since the age of 27, who began to suffer deafness a few years later. "I can no longer hear the silence of the lamp-posts," she said one day. [as quoted on page 25 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: Two wrongs don't make a right -- three lefts do.
[unknown]:: Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. [African Proverb]
[unknown]:: Virtue is it's own punishment.
[unknown]:: We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. [Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles, 1962]
[unknown]:: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul?
[unknown]:: What goes around usually gets dizzy and falls over.
[unknown]:: What I am is so real it dies on my lips. [as quoted on page 66 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
[unknown]:: What the hell, go and put all your eggs in one basket.
[unknown]:: When all else fails, follow instructions.
[unknown]:: When asked about the possibility of life after death, Schweitzer replied, "No one ever came back. But as long as someone is kept alive in the heart and actions of others, he is alive." [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]
[unknown]:: When everything comes your way, you're in the wrong lane.
[unknown]:: When in doubt, give advice.
[unknown]:: When it comes to thought some people stop at nothing.
[unknown]:: When you're run down the best thing to take is the licence number.
[unknown]:: Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.
[unknown]:: Work is a fine thing if it doesn't take too much of your spare time.
[unknown]:: Worship the gods, listen to their advice, but don't lend them money.
[unknown]:: You are accustomed to ostracism from childhood because you are overweight, deformed, stupid, or have an extremely short [deleted].
[unknown]:: You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
[unknown]:: You're never too old to learn something stupid.
Abd-El-Raham:: I have now reigned above fifty years in victory and peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to be wanting for my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy confidence in this present world!
Douglas Adams:: Don't try to engage my enthusiasum because I haven't got one. [Marvin the Paranoid Android, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]
Louis Agassiz:: Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly, they say they always believed it. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar; see also William James]
Fred Allen:: Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
William R. Allen:: Certainly, it is a world of scarcity. But the scarcity is not confined to iron ore and arable land. The most constricting scarcities are those of character and personality. ['Bunnie Rabbit, Winnie, and the Grand Plan,' California Political Review, Winter 1993, page 13.]
Woody Allen:: How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
Woody Allen:: More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
St. Thomas Aquinas:: There is always something for the superior angels to make known to the inferior. [from 4-volume anthology read by the Ninth Street Center Study Group]
Aristophanes:: It's not our friends teach us resourcefulness, but our wise enemies. Cities and princes have learned the use of warships and fortresses from necessity, not from friends. Enmity saves our homes, our children, everything that we love. [The Birds, translated by Dudley Fitts, page 182]
Aristotle:: It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Aristotle:: The gods too are fond of a joke.
Gertrude Atherton:: Laurens was dead. . . . Hamilton mourned him passionately, and never ceased to regret him. . . . Betsey consoled, diverted and bewitched him, but there were times when he would have exchanged her for Laurens. The perfect friendship of two men is the deepest and highest sentiment of which the finite mind is capable; women miss the best in life. [from The Conqueror, page 227]
Saint Augustine:: Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
Francis Bacon:: He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. [Of Marriage and Single Life]
Sir James Matthews Barrie:: When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they went skipping about and that was the beginning of fairies.
John Bart:: The truth belongs to all men, and the occasion of its discovery is of no particular importance. [tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, MD]
Jilian Becker:: Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. [ Director, Institute for the Study of Terrorism]
Bernard Berenson:: Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Ingrid Bergman:: Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
A. R. Bernard:: What we fail to repent of we are destined to repeat.
Yogi Berra:: You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.
Ambrose Bierce:: Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
Ambrose Bierce:: The covers of this book are too far apart.
William Blake:: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. [as quoted on page 24 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
William Blake:: It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
Niels Bohr:: The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Napoleon Bonaparte:: Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Christian Nevell Bovee:: False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
General Omar Bradley:: Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Berthold Brecht:: Out of the libraries come the killers. Mothers stand despondently waiting, hugging their children and searching the sky, looking for the latest inventions of professors. Engineers sit hunched over their drawings: One figure wrong and the enemy cities remain undestroyed. [quoted by Freeman Dyson in the tv show A Glorious Accident, 1994]
Freda Bright:: In the late 1600's the finest instruments originated from three rural families whose workshops were side by side in the Italian village of Cremona. First were the Amatis, and outside their shop hung a sign: "The best violins in all Italy." Not to be outdone, their next door neighbors, the family Guarnerius, hung a bolder sign proclaiming: "The Best Violins In All The World!" At the end of the street was the workshop of Anton Stradivarius, and on its front door was a simple notice which read: "The best violins on the block." [as quoted on page 17 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Mel Brooks:: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die.
Rita Mae Brown:: Success isn't external. There is an inner life, a life deeper than intellect. Finding that chord might mean failing in the outer world. [from Six of One, quoted by Carl Luss in a letter to Paul Rosenfels]
Robert Browning:: Sun treader, life and light be thine forever! [to Percy Bysshe Shelley]
William Jennings Bryan:: No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
Jimmy Buffett:: We are the people our parents warned us about.
Luther Burbank:: I don't feel good. [last words]
Edmund Burke:: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]
George Burns:: I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
Samuel Butler:: A hen is just an egg's way of making another hen.
Samuel Butler:: Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Joseph Campbell:: People talk about finding the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is an experience of it.
Joseph Campbell:: The old patterns of the hero's quest still hold true. The latest incarnation of Oedipus is standing at the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street waiting for the lights to change.
Al Capone:: Vote early and vote often.
Al Capone:: You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
Mason Capwell:: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is Bambi, squashed beneath it, any less dead?
Andrew Carnegie:: As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie:: People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
Joyce Cary:: Love doesn't grow on trees like apples. You have to build it, step by step. It's all work, work, work.
Cato the Elder:: After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Charlie Chaplin:: In the end, everything is a gag.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton:: Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.
Winston S. Churchill:: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Winston S. Churchill:: A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston S. Churchill:: Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Winston S. Churchill:: A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston S. Churchill:: I had a feeling once about Mathematics -- that I saw it all. Depth beyond Depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after dinner and I let it go. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Winston S. Churchill:: Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.
Winston S. Churchill:: Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. [in 1949, speaking at Britain's National Book Exhibition about his World War II memoirs]
C. West Churchman:: When you postpone thinking about something too long, then it may not be possible to think about it adequately at all. [quoted on pg. 24 of The Netweaver's Sourcebook by Dean Gengle]
Cicero:: No sane man will dance.
Tom Clancy:: The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Arthur C. Clarke:: I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. [3001: The Final Odessey, page 274]
Grover Cleveland:: It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory. [1887, referring to the tariff]
Jean Cocteau:: Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
William Congreve:: Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.
Tom Connelly:: He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes, but he who never asks a question remains a fool forever.
Gary Cooper:: I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper. [on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind"]
Corbousier:: City planning is too important to be left to citizens.
Sheryl Crow:: No one said it would be easy, but no one told me it would be this hard.
e e cummings:: I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
Dinesh D'Souza:: Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated. [The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: The Free Press, 1995), page 554.]
Charles Darwin:: As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. [end of next to last paragraph of The Origin of Species]
Charles Darwin:: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Clarence Day:: The World of Books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out and after an era of darkness new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.
Honore de Balzac:: Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
Charles de Gaulle:: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle:: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Jean (1645-1696) de La Bruyere:: A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
Marquis de la Grange:: When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Pierre-Simon de Laplace:: All the effects of nature are only the mathematical consequence of a small number of immutable laws.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:: A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Eugene Victor Debs:: While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. [quoted by the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, who said: "Noble words, and they find echoes down the ages."]
Jacques Delille:: Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.
Demosthenes:: Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
Rene Descartes:: Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. ["Discours de la Methode"]
Denis Diderot:: Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. [French philosopher (1713-84), from D'Alembert's Dream, "Conversation between d'Alembert and Diderot" (written 1769; published 1830; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. by Lester G. Crocker, 1966)]
Paul Dirac:: In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Frederick Douglass:: Everybody has asked the question . . . "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ["What the Black Man Wants," Negro Social and Political Thought 1850-1920: Representative Texts, edited by Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1962), page 283.]
Arthur Conan Doyle:: "And now, Doctor we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to Violin Land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex with their conundrums." [The Red Headed League]
Arthur Conan Doyle:: "Is there are point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"; "To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime."; "The dog did nothing in the nighttime."; "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. [as quoted on page 93 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Charles H. Duell:: Everything that can be invented has been invented. [Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899]
Will and Ariel Durant:: Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. [The Lessons of History, page 101.]
Will Durant:: Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. [typical overwritten Durantism, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Esther Dyson:: If you want to cure all the world's problems, kill all the people.
Abba Eban:: His ignorance is encyclopedic.
Abba Eban:: Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.
Meister Eckhart:: Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground. [as quoted on page 7 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
May Edel:: Some people have suggested that the Eskimos carried things too far. They think that the Eskimo habits of sharing are just foolish. They say that the Eskimos just didn't have enough foresight to bother about providing for their own future needs, or to care for their belongings, or even to have a clear idea of owning. This wasn't true at all. The Eskimos were always very careful with their things. The man who made a tool was its abolute owner. But there was no point in keeping it put away if someone else needed it. That kind of selfish 'human nature' hadn't been invented yet. [The Story of People, 1953, page 57]
Thomas Alva Edison:: If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Alva Edison:: Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Alva Edison:: To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas Alva Edison:: What man's mind can create, man's character can control. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Albert Einstein:: God may be subtle, but He isn't cruel.
Albert Einstein:: He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Albert Einstein:: I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to.
Albert Einstein:: I never bother to memorize anything I can look up.
Albert Einstein:: I never think of the future -- it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein:: If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]
Albert Einstein:: Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein:: It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein:: It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein:: Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein:: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein:: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein:: Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein:: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein:: We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Dwight David Eisenhower:: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953]
T. S. Eliot:: Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Black Elk:: While I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw. [as quoted on page 43 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Prof. Scott Elledge:: It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man. [on his retirement from Cornell]
George Elliot:: Dorothea had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling that there was always some thing better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better. Her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who live faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. [concluding narration of BBC tv's Middlemarch, 1994]
Jim Elliot:: He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
Paul Eluard:: There is another world, but it is in this one. [as quoted on page 77 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. . . . The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag of a hundred tasks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. [from Self-Reliance]
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. [from Self-Reliance]
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: I hate quotations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. [from Self-Reliance]
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: Life consists of what a man is thinking about all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:: When it is dark enough, men see the stars. [saying imprinted on a 1970's Magnetic Novelty Co. refridgerator magnet]
Epicurus:: Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
Eric Erikson:: Some day, maybe, there will exist a well informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit.
Jules Feiffer:: I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived, but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary. [1965]
David B. Feinberg:: Thomas Alva Edison said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. As every writer knows, writing is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent procrastination . . .
Paul Fix:: The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
Gustave Flaubert:: It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew He could hear me. Praised may He be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
Keith Floyd:: Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for outside their own consciousness, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking. [as quoted on page 89 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Marechal Ferdinand Foch:: Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value. [Prof. of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre]
Henry Ford:: Every generation has its own problems; it ought to find out its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can't do things better than our fathers did.
Henry Ford:: Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
Gene Fowler:: Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Anatole France:: The average person does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one that will last forever.
Benjamin Franklin:: Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin:: Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
Benjamin Franklin:: Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Robert Frost:: A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Buckminster Fuller:: Consideration -- a nice word meaning putting two stars together. [as quoted on page 14 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Buckminster Fuller:: Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
Buckminster Fuller:: When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. [as quoted on page 92 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]
Margaret Fuller:: Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
John Kenneth Galbraith:: Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith:: You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
Galileo Galilei:: I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei:: I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:: There is more to life than increasing speed.
Gandhi:: The greatness of a nation . . . can be judged by the way its animals are treated. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]
Bill Gates:: 640K ought to be enough for anybody. [in 1981]
Carl Friedrich Gauss:: Ask her to wait a moment -- I am almost done. [when informed that his wife is dying]
Murray Gell-Mann:: Around 1970 I was one of a small group of physicists, biologists, painters, and poets assembled in Aspen, Colorado to discuss the experience of getting creative ideas. We each described an incident in our own work. . . .; The accounts all agreed to a remarkable extent. We had each found a contradiction between the established way of doing things and something we needed to accomplish: in art, the expression of a feeling, a thought, an insight; in theoretical science, the explanation of some experimental facts in the face of an accepted 'paradigm' that did not permit such an explanation.; First, we had worked, for days or weeks or months, filling our minds with the difficulties of the problem in question and trying to overcome them. Second, there had come a time when further conscious thought was useless, even though we continued to carry the problem around with us. Third, suddenly, while we were cycling or shaving or cooking . . . the crucial idea had come. We had shaken loose from the rut we were in.; We were all impressed with the congruence of our stories. Later on I learned that this insight about the act of creation was in fact rather old. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great physiologist and physicist of the late nineteenth century, described the three stages of conceiving an idea as saturation, incubation, and illumination, in perfect agreement with what the members of our group in Aspen discussed a century later.; Now what goes on during the second stage, that of incubation? For the psychoanalytically oriented, among others, an interpretation that comes immediately to mind is that mental activity continues during the incubation period, but in the 'preconscious mind,' just outside of awareness. My own experience with the emergence of the right answer in a slip of the tongue could hardly fit better with that interpretation. But some academic psychologists, skeptical of such an approach, offer an alternative suggestion, that nothing really happens during incubation except perhaps a weakening of one's belief in the false principle that is obstructing the search for a solution. The real creative thinking takes place, in their view, just before the moment of illumination. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 264]
Murray Gell-Mann:: Economists have sometimes been lampooned as people who would measure the value of love by the price of prostitution. . . .; The apparently hard-headed practice of ignoring values difficult to quantify is often advertised as being value-free. On the contrary, it represents the imposition on any analysis of a rigid system of values, favoring those that are easily quantifiable over others that are more fragile and may be more important. All our lives are impoverished by decisions based on that kind of thinking. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 324]
Murray Gell-Mann:: If one were to stand back and estimate the prospects for a successful, comprehensive program of conservation of biological diversity in the tropics, the results might not be encouraging. However, history shows clearly that humanity is moved forward not be people who stop every little while to try to gauge the ultimate success or failure of their ventures, but by those who think deeply about what is right and then put all their energy into doing it. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 338]
Murray Gell-Mann:: Sometimes people who for some dogmatic reason reject biological evolution try to argue that the emergence of more and more complex forms of life somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics. Of course it does not, any more than the emergence of more complex structures on a galactic scale. Moreover, in biological evolution we can see a kind of 'informational' entropy increase as living things come into better adjustment with their surroundings, thus reducing an informational discrepancy reminiscent of the temperature discrepancy between a hot and a cold object. In fact, complex adaptive systems all exhibit this phenomenon -- the real world exerts selection pressures on the systems and the schemata tend to respond by adjusting the information they contain in accordance with those pressures. Evolution, adaptation, and learning by complex adaptive systems are all aspects of the winding down of the universe. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 372]
Murray Gell-Mann:: The effective complexity of the universe is the length of a concise description of its regularities. Like the algorithmic information content, the effective complexity receives only a small contribution from the fundamental laws. The rest comes from the numerous regularities resulting from 'frozen accidents.' Those are chance events of which the particular outcomes have a multiplicity of long-term consequences, all related by their common ancestry.; The consequences of some such accidents can be far-reaching. The charac