- Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
-- Dr. Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull
- My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
-- Thomas Hardy
- The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong.
-- William Randolph Hearst
- What luck for rulers, that men do not think.
-- Adolph Hitler
- You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
-- Eric Hoffer
- Art is limitation: the essence of every picture is the frame.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936),_Orthodoxy_, Chap. 3
- Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
-- John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire (1648-1721), _Essay on Poetry_
- I just sit at the typewriter and curse a bit.
- -P G Wodehouse (1881-1975), on his technique as a writer, _Collier's_, August, 31, 1956
- Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency... to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ is worth any number of old ladies.
-- William Faulkner (1897-1962), _Writers At Work_ (1958)
- Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.
-- Voltaire
- Science advances, not by the accumulation if new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.
- James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) American chemist, diplomat, and educator
- Progress of science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, provably in that order.
- Sydney Brenner (1927- ) South African molecular biologist
- I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm.
-- Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III/Scene ii
- I am at two with nature.
-- Woody Allen
- Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
-- Robert Benchley
- The innovator is not an opponent of the old, but a proponent of the new.
-- Lyle E. Schaller
- Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag it's tail.
-- Richard Friedman
- Nobody can fully understand the meaning of love until he's owned a dog. He can show you more honest affection with a flick of his tail than a man can gather through a lifetime of handshakes.
-- Anon.
- Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
-- Christopher Morley
- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams
- Storytelling reveals meaning without comitting the error of defining it.
-- Hannah Arendt
- When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, it has been a lousy meeting.
-- Herbert Clark Hoover
- Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
-- William Safire
- Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.
-- William Blake
- Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-- Euripides
- The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
-- Tom Robbins, _Still Life With Woodpecker_
- You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
-- Woodrow Wilson
- Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
-- Timothy Leary
- Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
-- Senator Eugene McCarthy
- FUMBLE: in football, a rehearsed move that allows the other team to catch up to the point spread. Compare MUMBLE, a player's answers in the news conference after the game.
-- The Diabolical Dictionary of Modern English
- You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.
-- Arlo Guthrie
- Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
-- Rodin
- The future will be better tomorrow.
-- Dan Quayle
- What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty!
in form, in moving,
how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me; no, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling, you seem to say so.
--William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, II, ii, 316
- I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly,
I know a hawk from a handsaw.
-- Sheakespeare, _Hamlet_, II, ii, 405
- Politics is not the art of the posssible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbreath
- Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-- -Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
- Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblence to the first.
-- Ronald Reagan, quoted in Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
- It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crown keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-- -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength.
-- Ralph Sockman
- Marriage: the only sport in which the trapped animal has to buy the license.
- Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.
-- Bertrand Russell
- Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
-- Wendell Johnson
- The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Where love is concerned, too much is not enough.
-- Pierre A. de Beaumarchais
- As soon as you can not keep anything from a woman, you love her.
-- Paul Geraldy
- There is nothing ridiculous in love.
-- Olive Schreiner
- I was married by a judge. I should've asked for a jury.
-- George Burns
- I am a firm believer in getting married in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out you haven't wasted a whole day.
-- Mickey Rooney
- A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.
-- Andre Maurois
- You can not pluck roses without fear of thorns, Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say "Canada". Maybe we should invade North Dakota or something.
-- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S.A.
- Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
- Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people.
-- Cynthia Heimel
- There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?
-- Danny DeVito, _The War of the Roses_
- All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust..."
-- Shakespeare
- A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.
-- Abraham Maslow
- You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
-- Proverb
- You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back, you've got something.
-- Hartley's First Law
- You can lead a computer to the Superhighway but you can't make it think.
-- Des Waller
- The kind of work we do does not make us holy, but we can make it holy. However "sacred" a calling may be, as it is a calling, it has no power to sanctify; but rather as we are and have the divine being within, we bless each task we do, be it eating, or sleeping, or watching, or any other.
-- Meister Eckhart
- Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with aperson, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand willtake and sift them, kepp what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
-- Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
- One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
-- Margaret Mead
- To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
-- Anna Louise Strong
- Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
- -Simone Signoret
- If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?
-- Lily Tomlin
- Dum loquimur invida aetas fugerit.
[While we talk, hostile time flies away]
-- Horace, Ode XI
- Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
[Perhaps it will be pleasing sometime to have remembered these things(events)]
-- Vergil, The Aeneid
- If a man wishes to
be sure of the road
he treads on, he must
close his eyes and
walk in the dark.
-- St. John of the Cross
- Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
-- Mary Ellen Kelly
- Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do.
-- Don Galer
- A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.
-- Dag Hammarskjold
- Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Integrity is the first step to true greatness. Men love to praise, but are slow to practice it. To maintain it in high places costs self-denial; in all places it is liable to opposition, but its end is glorious, and the universe will yet do it homage.
-- Charles Simmons
- Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
-- Lewis Mumford
- I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
-- Roland Barthes, from Mythologies, "La nouvelle Citroen"
- Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like *old* cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least *human,* for God's sake.
-- J. D. Salinger, from Catcher in the Rye
- My purposes are the geography that marks out my line of travel toward the person I want to be.
-- Alice Koller
- A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.
-- St. Augustine
- The open-minded see the truth in different things: the narrow-minded see only the differences.
-- Anonymous
- Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley
- The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.
-- Karl Barth
- Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
-- John Adams
- To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- Live fast, die young, make a pretty corpse.
-- Richard Wright, from Native Son
- I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby
- Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror.
-- Herb Brody
- The essential definition of neurotic behavior is behavior that's no longer in context.
-- Morris Schectman
- Americans want to go to heaven without dying.
-- James Thurber
- People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
-- Ken Kesey
- Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
-- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
- For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard Feynman, from the Challenger disaster report
- Even on the road to hell, flowers can make you smile.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
- The visionary is the only true realist.
-- Federico Fellini
- Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
-- John F. Kennedy
- The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.
-- Bill Beattie
- There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
-- Will Rogers
- It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
-- Bertrand Russell
- An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
-- Anon.
- I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed.
-- Thomas Jefferson
- The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.
-- John Gardner
- The sense of uselessness is the severest shock which our system can sustain.
-- Thomas Huxley
- The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-- John Gardner
- But if we believe what we profess concerning the worth of the individual, then the idea of individual development within a framework of ethical purpose must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession. We must think of education as relevant for everyone everywhere -- at all ages and in all conditions of life.
-- John Gardner
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