The Quotes Basement
Sub-Level 4

To achieve, you need thought. ... You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."

When you jump for joy, beware that no-one moves the ground from beneath your feet.
-Stanislaw Lem, "Unkempt Thoughts"

How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are going to be dead.
-Pryor's Observation

"I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in `Y.'"

There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so.

'To reign is worth ambition though in hell,
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'
-Satan, Paradise Lost

'Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exsist without it'
-Bertrand Russell

"Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences."
-Thornton Wilder (The Eighth Day Harper & Row)

'All that is gold does not glitter;
not all those that wander are lost.'
-the Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R.Tolkien

'Don't worry, I don't have low self-esteem. It's a mistake. I have low esteem for everyone else.'
- Daria

Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
-Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom

'You should make a point of trying every experience once -- except incest and folk-dancing.'
-A. Bax, ("Farewell My Youth")

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-John Keats

'We may become the makers of our fate when we have cedased to pose as its prophets.'
-Sir Karl Popper

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

"I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life."
- Elsa Maxwell (NY Journal-American 2 Nov)

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
-Evelyn Waugh (quoted in Michael Davie ed The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh Little, Brown)

'As you grow older, you will still do foolish things, but you will do them with much more enthusiasm.'
-The Cowboy

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: It's loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness.'
-John Keats

'Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become'
-George Wu

'Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.'
-Napoleon ill

Musicians ... own music because music owns them.
- Igor Stravinsky (commencement address at New England Conservatory of Music 18 May)

Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.
- Cecil Beaton (recalled on his death 18 Jan)

"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity."
-Robert Frost (quoted in New Republic 25 Oct)

"First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Proverbs in Prose)

To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.
-Suzanne Gordon (Lonely in America, Simon & Schuster)

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."
-Lorraine Hansberry

'What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.'
-Mignon McLaughlin (The Neurotic's Notebook Bobbs-Merrill)

"You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you."
-Arthur Miller (from his 1967 play The Price)

"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them."
-Evelyn Waugh (Forbes 12 May)

Tension is the great integrity.
- Heinz R Pagels, (on his belief that "tensegrity" gives coherence to the structure of the universe)

I don't know much about art, but I know what I like.
-1928 the New York Times art critic Enrico RRafaelle

Gaffa tape is like the Force - It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together...

'Genius does what is must, and talent does what it can.'
-Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (Last Words of a Sensitive Second-Rate Poet)

'If voting could change the system, it would be illegal. If not voting could change the system, it would be illegal.'

'If you think the dead don't rise again, you should see this place when the bell goes'
-Sign above the classroom door

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"
-Hunter S. Thompson

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

"Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
-William James (The Principals of Psychology)

"Insanity is just a state of mind. No really, it is. That's the definition of insanity, you idiot."

Whenever someone tells you to take their advice, you can be pretty sure that they're not using it.

"What did you do when the ship sank?"
"I grabbed a cake of soap and washed myself ashore."

'People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.'

'Mother said there would be days like this, but she never said that there'd be so many!'
-Lee's Law

"Most people don't need a great deal of love nearly so much as they need a steady supply."

"He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks democracy itself."
-William S. Paley (chairman of CBS)

'Recent research has tended to show that the Abominable No-Man is being replaced by the Prohibitive Procrastinator.'
-C.N. Parkinson

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will only cause permanent psychological damage"
-Frank Woodly (pg.16 Housemeeting)

'My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.'
-Orson Welles

"It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius."
-Robert G. Ingersoll

"Certainly the game is rigged.
Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win."
-Robert Heinlein

If you sit down at a poker game and don't see a sucker, get up. You're the sucker.

"Women reason with the heart and are much less often wrong than men who reason with the head."
-DeLescure

'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.'
-Shakespeare ("King Lear")

"MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten years of careful development."

"Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then give it back to them."

"About the only thing we have left that actually discriminates in favor of the plain people is the stork."

"Remember kids, if there's a loaded gun in the room, be sure that you're the one holding it"
-Captain Combat

'Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.'
-Gilb

'The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be.'

'Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.'
-Susan Ertz

"Are you sure you're not an encyclopedia salesman?"
"No, Ma'am. Just a burglar, come to ransack the flat."
-Monty Python

'The most important service rendered by the press is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.'

"I didn't get sophisticated -- I just got tired. But maybe that's what sophisticated is -- being tired."
-Rita Gain

"You can't cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump."
-W.C. Fields

"Without facts, the decision cannot be made logically. You must rely on your human intuition."
-Spock ("Assignment: Earth", stardate unknown)

Gnagloot, n.:
A person who leaves all his ski passes on his jacket just to impress people.
-Rich Hall ("Sniglets")

"Peace is much more precious than a piece of land... let there be no more wars."
-Mohammed Anwar Sadat (1918-1981)

"Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying."
-Ingmar Bergman

"Ain't nothin' an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young man."
-Moms Mabley

'God gave man two ears and one tongue so that we listen twice as much as we speak.'
-Arab proverb

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Book of Bokonon)

"Those who hate and fight must stop themselves -- otherwise it is not stopped."
-Spock ("Day of the Dove", stardate unknown)

"Do you think your mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together if ever we had been married?"

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits easy.
And when I thinks, I goes to sleep.

"A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain."
-Lazarus Long ("Time Enough For Love")

"A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks."
-Lew Col

'Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.'
-Mark Twain

"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
-W. K. Clifford (British philosopher, circa 1876)

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him."
-Arthur C. Clarke

"Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups -- alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat."
-Alex Levine

"Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills."
-Ambrose Bierce

'In my house on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms above... so I never have to go upstairs.'

"I just bought a microwave fireplace... You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes."
-Steven Wright

'An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.'

"...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth."
-George Jacob Holyoake

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

"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."
-William Faulkner

'If God had meant for us to be in the Army, we would have been born with green, baggy skin.'

"The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens."
-Alexis de Tocqueville

"The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time."

"No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast."
-W.S. Gilbert

"How much for your women? I want to buy your daughter... how much for the little girl?"
-Jake Blues ("The Blues Brothers")

"In less than a century, computers will be making substantial progress on ... the overriding problem of war and peace."
-James Slagle

'All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.'

leverage, n.:
Even if someone doesn't care what the world thinks about them, they always hope their mother doesn't find out.

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail."
-Abraham Maslow

scribline, n.:
The blank area on the back of credit cards where one's signature goes.
-Rich Hall & Friends ("Sniglets")

"Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it."
-Clive James

The Fifth Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
-Rossiter

"Blessed is the man who having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."
-George Eliot

'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'
-Mark 8:36

'April Fools have a day all their own; the rest of us have to muddle along without any recognition at all.
-Rossiter