- Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
-- H.L. Mencken
- Half of the American people never read a newspaper.
Half never voted for President.
One hopes it is the same half.
-- Gore Vidal
- "I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower."
"Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!"
-- Ken Kesey from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
- Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George bernard Shaw
- Our elections are free - it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-- Bill Stern
- "I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts.
After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough."
-- Arizona senatorial candidate Claire Sargent, on women candidates
- It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
-- Gore Vidal
- No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.
-- Anon.
Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing.
-- Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)
- When he first ran for office, he appealed to the voters: "I never stole anything in my life. All I ask is a chance."
-- Anon.
- Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
-- Grover Cleveland
- I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
-- Gilbert & Sullivan, from HMS Pinafore
- If ever I get married again it would have to be under an anaesthetic.
-- Marie Tonkin
- Love may be a dream but marriage is a nightmare.
-- Joan Collins
- Marry in haste, repent in leisure.
-- Tilney
- Before marraige a man will like awake all night thinking about something you said. After marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it.
-- Anon.
- In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar--a practice which is still continued.
-- Helen Rowland
- When a girl marries she exchanges the attention of many men for the inattention of one.
-- Helen Rowland
- Our marriage would have worked if we hadn't lived together.
-- Joan Thompson
- Love is temporary insanity curable by marriage.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- Marriage is like a cage--one sees the birds outside desperate to get in and those inside equally desparate to get out.
-- Di Peatlins
- A girl must marry for love and keep on marrying until she finds it.
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor
- Marriage is a romance in which the heroine dies in the first chapter.
-- Cecilia Egan
- It's important to be open-minded, but not SO open-minded that your brains fall out.
-- Rick Radebaugh
- There's a difference between being open-minded & having a hole in your head.
-- Tom Parsons
- When looking back, usually I'm more sorry for the things I didn't do than for the things I shouldn't have done.
-- Malcolm Forbes
- We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.
-- Voltaire
- None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
-- Herman Melville
- No one finds life worth living; he must make it worth living.
-- Anon.
- If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
- I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
-- Anne Sullivan
- Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
-- Anne Sullivan
- My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!
-- Anne Sullivan
- Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over gain, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.
-- Anne Sullivan
- People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
-- Anne Sullivan
- It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
-- Henry James
- She felt in italics and thought in capitals.
-- Henry James
- To take what there "is", and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived - to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that - this doubtless is the right way to live.
-- Henry James
- I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.
-- Henry James
- I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
-- Henry James
- I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
-- Charlie Chaplin
- You have to believe in yourself, that's the secret. Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world.
-- Charlie Chaplin
- All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
-- Charlie Chaplin
- I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.
-- Charlie Chaplin
- No matter how desperate the predicament is, I'm always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.
-- Charlie Chaplin
- Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
-- Thornton Wilder
- Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
-- Thornton Wilder
- The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
-- Thornton Wilder
- For what human ill does dawn not seem to be an alternative?
-- Thornton Wilder
- Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
-- Thornton Wilder
- Thank God - every morning when you get up - that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you a hundred virtues which the idle never know.
-- Charles Kingsley
- Twenty years fron now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain
- What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.
-- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), French writer, moralist. Sentences et Maximes Morales, no. 83 (1678)
- Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
-- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist. Bernard, in The Waves (1931; repr. 1943, p. 189).
- Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Darlington, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, act 2.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds-and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never the lark, nor even eagle flew-
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee (1922-1941), High Flight
- Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another.
-- Kenny Ausubel
- Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
-- James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) Scottish dramatist and novelist
- It’s no credit to anyone to work to hard.
-- Ed Howe (1853-1937) American Journalist
- One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belive that one’s work is terribly important.
-- Bertrand Rusell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
- Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British playwright
- True thinkers are characterised by a blending of clearness and mystery.
-- Victor Hugo
- What a difference there is between what we say and what we think.
-- Racine
- Dulce bellum inexpertis. (War is lovely for those who know nothing about it.)
-- Erasmus Rotterdamus, Adagia
- The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the amount of work already completed.
-- VAIL'S SECOND AXIOM
- Work expands to fill the time available.
-- PARKINSON'S LAW
- My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.
-- ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865)
- Work and play are words to describe the same thing under different conditions.
-- MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
- The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
-- ROBERT FROST
- You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
-- WARREN BEATTY
- Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
-- OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)
- My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
-- INDIRA GANDHI
- Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it.
-- HENRY FORD
- Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
-- J.M. BARRIE
- By working faithfully eight hours a day, you might eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
-- ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)
- Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
-- MARK TWAIN, "THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER"
- The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a State depend.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-188) Prime Minister of Great Britain
- A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
-- Edward Abbey
- Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
-- Calvin
- I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life
-- Calvin
- I'm not dumb, I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.
-- Calvin
- There's no problem so awful that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse!
-- Calvin
- Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.
-- Robert A. Heinlein _The Rolling Stones_
- Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft...and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)
- We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization
-- Petronius Arbiter (d. 66 A.D.)
- A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.
-- Michael Winner (b. 1935)
- Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
-- Thomas Jones
- I don't meet competition. I crush it.
-- Charles Revlon (1906-1975)
- Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-- Wolfgang Amadè Mozart 1756-1791
- When you're lying awake with a dismal headache,
and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose
to indulge in, without impropriety
-- W. S. Gilbert
- 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 player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
-- T[homas] H[enry] Huxley 1825-1895 A Liberal Education [1868]
- We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
-- Isaac B. Singer
- For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
-- John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) _Maud Muller_ [1856]
- Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.
-- Hesiod, "The Theogony," line 694
- Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
-- Stephen Leacock
- If you wait until the last minute, then it only takes a minute.
-- -Someone in Mr. Deckert's senior design class
- In medieval times, people thought that evil spirits could enter a person through an open mouth. These days they more often leave that way.
-- David Deckert
- Like a kite
Cut from the string,
Lightly the soul of my youth
Has taken flight
-- Ishikawa Takuboku
- He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
-- Confucius
- If we don't change the direction we are going,
We are likely to end up where we are heading.
-- Chinese saying
- Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
-- H. L. Mencken
- Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-- Senator Soaper
- Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.
-- Anon.
- The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
-- William James
- 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
- Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- G. B. Shaw
- Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru
- Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
-- E. B. White
- Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
-- U.S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932), since withdrawn.
- The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
-- Paul Valery
- Clouds come floating into my life,
no longer to carry rain or usher storm,
but to add colour to my sunset sky.
-- Rabindranath Tagor
- Is there life before death?
-- Belfast Graffito
- Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
-- T.S. Eliot
- It is not because it is difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.
-- Lucius Anneaus Seneca
- A man's reach should exeed his grasp, or else what's a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning
- A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-- George Benard Shaw
- Launch out into the deep. One discovers by living in scorn of consequence.
-- Essie Summers
- Character is what you are in the dark.
-- Dwight L. Moody
- To be nobody-but-yourselsf
-- 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 ever fight; and never stop fighting.
-- e.e. cummings
- I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. we are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
-- Thoreau
- The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.
-- Lou Holtz (American football coach)
- Before you put on a frown, make absolutely sure there are no smiles available.
-- Jim Beggs
- The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
-- Thomas Jefferson
- He who receives an idea from me receives instruction for himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.
-- Thomas Jefferson
- The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
-- Thomas Jefferson
- Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
-- Thomas Jefferson
These are from the New York magazine competition where they asked competitors to change one letter in a familiar non-English phrase and redefine it:
- Harlez-vous francais? (Can you drive a French motorcycle?)
- Ex post fucto (Lost in the mail)
- Idios amigos (We're wild and crazy guys!)
- Veni, VIPi, Vici (I came; I'm a very important person; I conquered)
- J'y suis, J'y pestes (I can stay for the weekend)
- Cogito Eggo sum (I think; therefore, I am a waffle)
- Rigor Morris (The cat is dead)
- Respondez s'il vous plaid (Honk if you're Scots)
- Que sera, serf (Life is feudal)
- Le roi est mort. Jive le roi (The King is dead. No kidding.)
- Posh mortem (Going in style)
- Pro Bozo publico (Support your local clown)
- Monage a trois (I am three years old)
- Felix navidad (Our cat has a boat)
- Haste cuisine (Fast French food)
- Veni, vidi, vice (I came, I saw, I partied)
- Quip pro quo (A fast retort)
- Aloha oy! (Love; greetings; farewell; from such a pain you should never know)
- Mazel ton! (Lots of luck)
- Apres Moe, le deluge (Larry and Curly get wet)
- Porte-Kochere (Sacramental wine)
- Iic liebe rich (I'm really crazy about having dough)
- Fui generis (What's mine is mine)
- VISA la France (Don't leave chateau without it)
- Ca va sans dirt (And that's not gossip)
- Merci rien (Thanks for nothin')
- Amicus puriae (Platonic friend)
- L'etat, c'est moo (I'm bossy around here)
- L'etat, c'est Moe (All the world's a stooge)
- Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
-- Samuel Ullman
- Well if this is the wrong number, why did you answer it?
-- James Thurber
- I was nauseous and tingly all over... I was either in love or I had smallpox.
-- Woody Allen
- Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-- Laurence J. Peter
- Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.
--John Simon
- To realize that you do not understand is a virtue;
Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.
--Lao-Tzu, "Tao Teh Ching"
- Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
--Anon.
- I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
--Charlie Chaplin
- Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
-- H.L. Mencken
- Half of the American people never read a newspaper.
Half never voted for President.
One hopes it is the same half.
-- Gore Vidal
- "I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower."
"Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!"
-- Ken Kesey from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
- Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George bernard Shaw
- Our elections are free - it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-- Bill Stern
- "I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts.
After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough."
-- Arizona senatorial candidate Claire Sargent, on women candidates
- It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
-- Gore Vidal
- No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.
-- Anon.
Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing.
-- Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)
- When he first ran for office, he appealed to the voters: "I never stole anything in my life. All I ask is a chance."
-- Anon.
- Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
-- Grover Cleveland
- I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
-- Gilbert & Sullivan, from HMS Pinafore
- If ever I get married again it would have to be under an anaesthetic.
-- Marie Tonkin
- Love may be a dream but marriage is a nightmare.
-- Joan Collins
- To do great, important tasks, two things are necessary: a plan and not quite enough time.
-- Anon.
- Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.
-- Anon.
- If the government wants people to respect the law, it should set a better example.
-- Anon.
- I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
-- Winston Churchill
From: Brother Kostya Kekhaev
- A diplomat is a person who:
- -always knows what to talk about, but doesn't always talk about what he knows.
- -always tries to settle problems created by other diplomats.
- -can always make himself misunderstood.
- -can bring home the bacon without spilling the beans.
- -can say the nastiest things in the nicest way.
- -can tell you to go to hell so tactfully that you look forward to the trip.
- -comes right out and says what he thinks when he agrees with you.
- -divides his time between running for office and running for cover.
- -lets you do all the talking while he gets what he wants.
- -puts his cards on the table, but still has some up each sleeve.
- -will lay down your life for his country.
- A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
-- Arthur Schoperhauer
- Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
-- William Yeats
- Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
-- Mark Twain
- Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.
-- Danny Kaye
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