Last updated: June 22, 2009
"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." - George Washington
"Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say." - William Watt
"I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us." - Konrad Lorenz
"I don't know if I like the idea of seatbelt laws. Enforcing intelligence seems, somehow, un-American." - David Pugh
"Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were antimaterialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say 'Now, let's write a swimming pool'." - Paul McCartney
"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter." - Thomas Jefferson
"What is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi." - P. J. O'Rourke
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." - Pericles
"I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there." - Fred Allen
"The Chinese government launched China's first 24-hour news channel. And since the channel will only report stories that are favorable to the ruling party, they've decided to call it Fox News." - Conan O'Brien
"There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11." -- Sen. Joseph Biden, on Rudy Guiliani
"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency." - George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaware that a live television camera was still rolling
"Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them?" - Ashleigh Brilliant
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislature, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." - P.J. O'Rourke
"Earl: You know, Grandma Ivy, in all the years I've know you I don't think you've ever answered a question directly.
Grandma Ivy: There are no answers. Only the search." - Pure Country
"Another factor this time is age. [Ralph] Nader is 2 years older than John McCain. Here's an SAT math question: Ralph Nader is older than John McCain. McCain says he is older than dirt. What is Ralph Nader's relationship with dirt?" - Votemaster, Electoral-Vote
"One filled with joy preaches without preaching." - Benjamin Franklin
"When thoughts come, you can invite them in but don't serve them tea." - Mel Weitsman
"The city, 1:00am. People in their rooms, asleep, lonely, depressed. One of them gets the urge to pet a small, furry animal. That's where I come in. My name's Friday. I carry a badger." - someone's sig file
"Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. They're more easily handled than dumb mistakes." - William Wister Haines
"Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance." - Anthony J. D'Angelo
"Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart." - George Eliot
"Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn how to do it well." - Zig Zaglar
"If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it." - Hlade's Law
"1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really." - Douglas Adams
"The ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan
"He shows great originality, which must be curbed at all cost." - report card remark for Sir Peter Ustinov
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." - Edmund Burke
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive." - Harold Whitman
"It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so." - Georges Bernanos
"Walking beside you I want for nothing." - Tim Finn
"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." - Socrates
"Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you." - Maori proverb
"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
"What you cannot enforce, do not command." - Sophocles
"You can't take the joy from the soul of this girl." - Cyndi Lauper
"Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?" - Rose Kennedy
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." - Albert Einstein
"Some think they are following their natural bent when they are just too lazy to straighten up." - Earl Riney
"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past." - Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic
"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." - George Moore
"One who desires the destruction of the foe should not put the foe on his guard." - Mahabharata
"Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk." - The Dalai Lama
"We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another." - Jonathan Swift
"If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it." - Jerome Singer
"You speak of loneliness but here's a soul adoring you. It's a wounded heart, it breaks in two, and in its pain it sings for you." - Wolfsheim
"Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Every day you spend drifting away from your goals is a waste not only of that day, but also of the additional days it takes you to regain lost ground." - Ralph Marston
"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll NEVER be friends. Love isn't brains children, it's blood... screaming inside you to work its will." - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." - Robert A. Heinlein
"The more we know the more we learn the more it sets us free" - Joy Machine
"Anyone who works is a fool. I don't work - I merely inflict myself upon the public." - Robert Morley
"Every fleeting thought you've ever had in your life, no matter how bizarre, is someone's lifelong obsession. And he has a website." - Skif's Internet Theorem
"Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly." - Jay-Z
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president." - Theodore Roosevelt
"So one must find out how to become happy oneself. Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes." - Ramana Maharshi
"Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment." - Jean de La Bruy�re
"Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start." - Nido Qubein
Seth Meyers: Governor, what do you have against New Jersey?
Fred Armisen as Governor David Paterson: Unfortunately, a Southern border. - Saturday Night Live
"If you know me why don't you tell me what I'm thinking." - Crowded House
"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you -- if you don't play, you can't win." - Robert Heinlein
"You can't expect to win unless you know why you lose."� � Benjamin Lipson
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat may come along and make a fortuitous life preserver. This is not to say, though, that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem." - R Buckminster Fuller
"We teach what we need to learn." - Gloria Steinem
"Goals are the barriers that limit our ability to reach our true potential." - David V. Ellison
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice." - Albert Camus
"The Pope is in Africa 'reaffirming the ban on condom use.' His old stuff was funnier. I don't get this new material. Too edgy for my taste." - Christopher Walken, http://twitter.com/cwalken
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else." - Umberto Eco
"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later." - Mitch Hedberg
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir... mighty scarce." - Mark Twain
"Dick Cheney is trying to defend torture... he goes 'they should release the memos to show all that good information we got from our practices.' You can't defend torture. That's like me robbing a bank and then going in front of the judge and saying, 'Yes your honor, I robbed a bank. But look at all these bills I paid.'" - Wanda Sykes
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." - David Brin
"The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it." - Laurence J. Peter
"Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished yet." - Mr. & Mrs. Smith
"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." - Charles A. Beard
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false and to incur my own abhorrence." - Frederick Douglass
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are." - Benjamin Franklin
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." - Ray Bradbury
"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling." - Paula Poundstone
"If you have no enemies, you have no character." - Paul Newman
"Think of musical comedy - the most glorious words in the English language." - 42nd Street
"Think twice before you speak, and then you may be able to say something more insulting than if you spoke right out at once." - Evan Esar
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain
"I can't help it if I stretch the truth, not if that's the way it happened." - Tim Finn
“Maturity is knowing when it’s okay to act like a kid." - http://dream-out-loud77.xanga.com/weblog/
"There's nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms." - Scott Adams
"Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game." - Paul Rodriguez
"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" - Henry Ward Beecher
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world, and those who are smart enough to know better." - Tom Robbins
"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting." - Charles Bukowski
"Patrick: I don’t have an agenda. That’s a bit offensive, actually. I’m perfectly capable of being friends with a woman without any kind of agenda.
Steve: For how long?
Patrick: As long as it takes." - Coupling
"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather." - Michael Pritchard
"Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either." - Evan Esar
"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous." - Shana Alexander
"When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before." - Cliff Fadiman
"The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality... I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet." - Barney Frank, Politico.com
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