The Best of Quotations

• First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
     --Douglas Adams

• Why did the Mafia kill Einstein? He knew too much.
     --Anon.

• If riding in an airplane is flying, then riding in a boat is swimming. If you want to experience the element, get out of the vehicle.
     --Anon.

• Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you just how busy they are?
     --Anon.

• Some people develop eye strain looking for trouble.
     --Anon.

• The only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the tongue.
     --Anon.

• If you sing country music backwards, you get your job and your wife back.
     --Anon.

• Someone who thinks of himself as a wit is usually half right.
     --Anon.

• A baby is the most complicated object made by unskilled labor.
     --Anon.

• Why not move the political conventions to one of the winter months so all that hot air won't go to waste?
     --Anon.

• Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
     --Anon.

• Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it.
     --Anon.

• Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
     --Anon.

• Four out of five people hate being surveyed.
     --Anon.

• It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis.
     --Margaret Bonnano

• Sometimes I need what only you can provide - Your absence.
     --Ashleigh Brilliant

• Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
     -- Sam Brown

• I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
     -- A. Whitney Brown

• Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.
     -- James D. Bryden

• Anything worth having is worth working for.
     --Andrew Carnegie

• The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
     --G. K. Chesterton

• There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a thousand disadvantages, the world will always turn return to monogamy.
     --G. K. Chesterton

• It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
     -- L.Sprague de Camp

• Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
     --Winston Churchill

• Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
     --Cyril Connolly

• We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
     -- e. e. cummings

• To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
     -- e.e. cummings

• I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.
     --Clarence Darrow

• There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
     --Daniel Dennett

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
     -- Philip K. Dick

• People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected.
     -- Marian Wright Edelman

• The reason that the all American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think.
     -- Farrah Fawcett-Majors

• It was not so long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very, very small snack foods.
     --Geraldine Ferraro

• My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
     -- Errol Flynn

• Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
     -- Harry Emerson Fosdick

• For me the initial delight is in the surpise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing...is discovering.
     --Robert Frost

• A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
     --Robert Frost

• I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
     --Robert Frost

• Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
     --R. Buckminster Fuller

• You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
     --Galileo Galilei

• I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forego their use.
     --Galileo

• If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
     --J.P. Getty

• I'm proud of paying taxes. The only thing is --- I could be just as proud for half the money.
     --Arthur Godfrey

• He who seeks for applause only from without has all his happiness in another's keeping.
     --Oliver Goldsmith

• When one loves somebody, everything is clear - where to go, what to do - it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.
     --Maxim Gorky

• The longer the excuse, the less likely it's the truth.
     -- Robert Half

• Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
     -- R.A.Heinlein

• The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
     -- Abbie Hoffman

• Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
     -- Oliver Wendel Holmes

• I hope my achievements in life shall be these:
  That I will have fought for what was right and fair,
  that I will have risked for that which mattered, that
  I will have given help to those who were in need...
  That I will have left the earth a better place for what
  I've done and who I've been.
     --C. Hoppe

• The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly
     --Thomas Huxley

• What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
     --W.R. Inge

• Great minds have purposes, little minds have wishes.
     --Washington Irving

• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
     -- Thomas Jefferson

• The stakes are much too high for government to be a spectator sport.
     -- Barbara Jordan

• A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
     -- Nikos Kazantzakis

• No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
     --Henry Kissinger

• If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
     --Anita Koddick

• When we say "War is over if you want it," we mean that if everyone demanded peace instead of another TV set, we'd have peace.
     --John Lennon

• The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.
     --Jay Leno

• Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.
     --C.S. Lewis, from The Allegory of Love

• How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
     --Abraham Lincoln

• Law begins when someone takes to doing something someone else doesn't like.
     -- Karl Llewellyn

• The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author's explanations it never should have been published.
     --Archibald MacLeish

• From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
     --W. Somerset Maugham

• The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
     --H. L. Mencken

• An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
     -- James Michener

• He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back -- that's an earthquake...A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
     --Arthur Miller, from Death of a Salesman

• A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.
     --Marilyn Monroe

• Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
     --Marianne Moore

• Meaning is not thought up and then written down. The act of writing is an act of thought. All writing is experimental in the beginning. It is an attempt to solve a problem, to find a meaning, to discover its own way towards a meaning.
     --Donald Murray

• Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
     --Vladimir Nabokov

• A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
     --Thomas Paine

• It's a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.
     --Arnold Palmer

• Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.
     -- Hesketh Pearson

• I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.
     --Beryl Pfizer

• When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.
     --Pablo Picasso

• I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends call it.
     -- Edgar Allen Poe

• Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
     -- Ezra Pound, from How to Read

• If hard work were really a virtue, then mules would be saints.
     -- James D. Richardson

• In later life, as in earlier, only a few persons influence the formation of our character; the multitude pass us by like a distant army. One friend, one teacher, one beloved, one club, one dining table, one work table are the means by which one's nation and the spirit of one's nation affect the individual.
     -- Jean Paul Richter

• Two step formula for handling stress:
  1. Don't sweat the small stuff.
  2. Remember that it's all small stuff.
     --Anthony Robbins

• It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself.
     --Francois de la Rochefoucauld

• Never assume the obvious is true.
     --William Safire

• I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
     --J.D.Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye

• We have a Bill of Rights, which protects each of us from a bullying society, but no Bill of Responsibilities, which would oblige us to answer to the needs of others.
     --Scott Russel Sanders

• A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.
     --Marilyn Vos Savant

• Yes, you can be a dreamer and a doer too, if you will remove one word from your vocabulary: impossible.
     -- H. Robert Schuller

• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage--to move in the opposite direction.
     -- Ernst F. Schumacher

• A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
     -- George Bernard Shaw

• To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it, life will be valueless.
     --Marsha Sinetar

• Whether by the strike of the enemy or your own thrust, whether by the man who strikes or the sword that strikes, whether by position or rhythm, if your mind is diverted in any way, your actions will falter, you will be cut down.
     --Takuan Soho

• It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
     -- Gertrude Stein

• Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
  Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the film Star Trek: Generations

• We do not walk on our legs, but on our Will.
     -- Sufi proverb

• Sutins Law: The most useless tasks are the most fun to do!

• He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has alreadt earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
     -- Mark Twain

• Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
     -- Mark Twain

• The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
     --Voltaire

• There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope they are organised along the lines of the Mafia.
     --Kurt Vonnegut, from The Sirens of Titan

• The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.
     -- H.G. Wells

• Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
     -- Jane Wells

• I 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, in 1913

• Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about 'a' man.
     -- E.B. White

• Weinberg's first Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

• Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
     --Oscar Wilde

• Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
     --Oscar Wilde

• No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
     --Ian E. Wilson

• Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
     --Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room

• Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
     -- F.L. Wright

• When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
     --Henny Youngman

• Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
     -- Frank Zappa