Quotations

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
-Niels Bohr

Altruism is a fine motive, but if you want results, greed works much better.
-- Henry Spencer

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. . . . What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune. 
Mohandas K. Gandhi

America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, "I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out"

A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you. 
Bert Leston Taylor 

A lady came up to me on the street and pointed to my suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too."
Jake Johanson

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness. 
Aristotle

For him there is but one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which dwells in the faces of Greek statues, the calm which comes not from the rejection but the absorption of passion.
Oscar Wilde

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
Oscar Wilde

I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Ashleigh Brilliant

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. 
Lewis Carroll

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it.
Bob Hope

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. 
Oscar Wilde

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.
Lewis Carroll, from Alice in Wonderland

Someone's boring me. I think it's me.
Dylan Thomas

Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked Brightness, but it doesn't work.
Gallagher

When the cat and mouse agree, the grocer is ruined. 
Persian Proverb

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Brooks Adams

When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before.
Mae West

Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitler's passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.
Robert Runcie

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

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
E. W. Dijkstra

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.
Epicurus

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
Oscar Wilde

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. 
George Bernard Shaw

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try to win one another's money. Idiots! 
Arthur Schopenhauer

I am a deeply superficial person.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
Robert Cringely/InfoWorld

Diplomacy --- the art of saying "Nice doggie" 'til you can find a stick.
Wynn Catlin

"You're right, I'm wrong. Thanks for disagreeing." 
-- Rich Salz

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
Leornardo da Vinci

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
Aristotle

My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money. 
Joe Weinstein

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O'Rourke

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has not got soul and they blame the computers: "There is no soul here." It's like you couldn't blame the computer: if there's no soul in the music it's because nobody put it there.
Björk

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots. 
Isak Dinesen

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably sinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them.
Elizabeth Janeway

Family . . . the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
August Strindberg

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Goya

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
George Eliot

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask reamins a fool forever.
Old Chinese saying

For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in the things apart from their appearences.
Oscar Wilde

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.
Groucho Marx

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.
Adlai Stevenson

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Nietzsche

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
Benjamin Disraeli

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
Samuel Butler

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
Oscar Levant

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis

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Proverbs of Hell

"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy."

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity."

"He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."

"The cut worm forgives the plough."

"Dip him in the river who loves water"

"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough"

"If others had not been foolish, we should be so."

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

"The busy bee has no time for sorrow."

"The most sublime act is to set another before you."

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."

"Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion."

"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."

"Expect poison from the standing water."

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."

"Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd."

"Enough! or Too much." 

 (selected)

William Blake (1757-1827)

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For a while I didn't have a car...I had a helicopter...no place to park it, so I just tied it to a lamp post and left it running. [slow glance upward]

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.
Sigmund Freud

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. 
Christopher Hampton

The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
Abigail Van Buren

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick -- not wounded -- dead.
Woody Allan

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans-who were not allowed to learn to read and write-and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.
Barbara Ehrenreich

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
Robert Browning

The more ignorant the authority, the more dogmatic it is. In the fields where no real knowledge is even possible, the authorities are the fiercest and most assured and punish non-belief with the severest of penalties.
Abraham Myerson

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Warton

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde

I got up one morning and couldn't find my socks, so I called Information. She said, "Hello, Information" I said, "I can't find my socks" She said, "They're behind the couch"

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
Goethe

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
Aleister Crowley

"If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself: one is 'Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life': the other is 'The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.' The first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also. He was the first person who ever said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives.' He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type of what people should try to become" 
Oscar Wilde

Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters and, yes, even your own life, you can't be my disciple.
Jesus Christ, if St. Luke is to be believed (Luke 14:26)

That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be against Christians.
William Blake

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Law of force: Don't force it - get a bigger hammer.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Nick Diamos

The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.
Freeman Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions"

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. 
Albert Einstein

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.
Albert Camus

A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body. 
Unknown 

Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
Groucho Marx

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

La verdad es la verdad... Más mentiras no quiero. It's OK to think, no one has to know.

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

I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, "Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours" He said, "Yes, but not in a row"

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Drew Lawson

Old hippies don't die, they just lie low until the laughter stops and their time comes round again.
Joseph Gallivan

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. 
James F. Byrnes

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde

"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." 
Groucho Marx.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
Bertrand Russell

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. 
Somerset Maugham

Sometimes it's not the quality of the disasters that counts, it's the quantity.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation... The other eight are unimportant.
Henry Miller

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are. 
Dale Carnegie

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art. 
Oscar Wilde 09 Jan 1882 Mon Chickering Hall, New York

"Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best."
Woody Allan

Only the shallow know themselves.
Oscar Wilde

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the world depends.
Oscar Wilde

I spilled spot remover on my dog. He's gone now.

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Aaron Levenstein

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. 
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

If you want to commit suicide you can use my razor; it's electric, but you can hang yourself with the cord.

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. 
Abraham Lincoln

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.
Henry B. Adams

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions"

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam. 
Marshall McLuhan

As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women. 
Alice Walker

The art of leadership . . . consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention. . . . The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.
Adolf Hitler

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
Hungarian Proverb

"In Venezuela, many people think someone who passes up the chance to steal is a fool", said Gustavo Coronel, head of Quality of Life, a private group that conducts anti-corruption workshops. "We're a hyper-corrupt country."

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. 

The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen

The last Christian died on the cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.
Pierre Corneille

Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Jean Giraudoux

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
John Locke

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education, if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon, all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
Oscar Wilde

The rich are more envied by those who have a little, than by those who have nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for breif periods.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
Andre Gide

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
Paul Beatty

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. 
H.L. Mencken

Some women blush when they are kissed, some call for the police, some swear, some bite. But the worst are those who laugh.
Anonymous

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Thoughts on Humor:
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Heisenberg

A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people. 
- Peter McArthur

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
- James Thurber

Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
- Mort Walker

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To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde

I love to go shopping. I love to freak out salespeople. They ask me if they can help me, and I say, "Have you got anything I'd like?"
Then they ask me what size I need, and I say, "Extra medium"
I bought some batteries, but they weren't included. So I had to buy them again.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
Woody Allen

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded! 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
Abigail Van Buren

The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
Franz Kafka

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth may be stretched, but cannnot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.
-Miguel Cervantes

"Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit."
Oscar Wilde

I have learned this at least by my experiments; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau

What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're in a sleeping bag, camping out with your girlfriend.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.
Joel Rosenberg, "The Silver Crown"

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.
Vincent Van Gogh

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
Gary Wills

We hear war called murder. It is not: it is suicide. 
Ramsay MacDonald

It is wisdom and wisdom only that will actually eat away at the foundation of racism. We must reject the conclusion that the body is the self. If we want to get at the root cause of racism, we must understand that we are not our bodies.
J.G. Siddhasvarupananda

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is...Nothing should be able to harm a man but himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. 
Oscar Wilde

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. 
William Hazlitt

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"
Sigmund Freud

. . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde

We have deep depth.
Yogi Berra

We made too many wrong mistakes.
Yogi Berra

You can observe a lot by just watching.
Yogi Berra

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