KGB Report

48 Observations on mediocrity:

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

A man attains an elevated position only when his mediocrity prevents him from being a threat to others. And for this reason a democracy is never governed by the most competent, but rather by those whose insignificance will not jeopardize anyone else's self-esteem.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.
-Mary Kay Ash

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp.
-Carson McCullers

Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
-Oscar Wilde

Don't rationalize mediocrity.
-George W. Miller

Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, 'This is good enough for you.' The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
-Florence King

Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women occupy high positions.
-Francois Giroud

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.
-Sophia Loren

Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.
-Henry Haskins

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
-Albert Einstein

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

In this country we encourage 'creativity' among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow 'too much.'
-Pauline Kael

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
-Oscar Wilde

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
-W. Somerset Maugham

It's disheartening to know that you live in a country that's just teeming with semi-literate, mediocre psychos.
-Henry Rollins

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
-Fulton J. Sheen

Media, the plural of mediocrity.
-Jimmy Breslin

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
-Charles G. Dawes

Mediocrity: It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late.
-Larry Kersten, PhD

Moderation has been made a virtue in order to curb the ambition of the great, and also to console those who are mediocre in either fortune or merit.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

My success is the result of not being satisfied with mediocrity, and in making the most of my opportunities.
-Milton S. Hershey

No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
-Alan Touring

Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.
-Harland Miller

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one's sputum.
-Vladimir Nabokov

Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-Jean Giraudoux

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
-Andrew Carnegie

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
-George F. Will

Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of a living Hell.
-Harlan Ellison

Pumpkin pie is the epitome of mediocrity. The best pumpkin pie you ever ate isn't that much better than the worst.
-Garrison Keillor

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.
-Tom Peters

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
-Jane Wagner

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.
-George Lois

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
-John Stuart Mill

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
-George Santayana

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-James Fenimore Cooper

The word media is plural for mediocre.
-René Saguisag

Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.
-Warren Buffett

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable . It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

We are in danger of developing a cult of the Common Man, which means a cult of mediocrity.
-Herbert Hoover

We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.
-Robertson Davies

What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.
-Auguste Preault

Why create mediocrity when you can copy genius?
-Unattributed

Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.
-Margaret Mead

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
-Guy de Maupassant

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(Today is also the birthday of Mother Jones)

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A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.
-Louis Pasteur

A cocktail is to a glass of wine as rape is to love.
-Paul Claudel

A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

A man who lies about beer makes enemies.
-Stephen King

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
-Charles Baudelaire

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Alcohol is a very necessary article... it enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
-George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
-Unattributed

Alcohol is really just the liquid version of Photoshop.
-@BillMurray

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
-George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
-Frank Sinatra

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
-Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.
-Dylan Thomas

Beer commercials are so patriotic: 'Made the American Way.' What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?
-Scott Blakeman

Beer is not a good cocktail party drink, especially in a home where you don't know where the bathroom is.
-Billy Carter

Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world.
-Jack Nicholson

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer- you can do it, just not as well as the others, really.
-Robin Williams

For a bad hangover, take the juice of two quarts of whiskey.
-Eddie Condon

Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.
-Proverbs 31:6-7 NIV

Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world.
-Kaiser Wilhelm

I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.
-Robert Downey, Jr.

I am more afraid of King Alcohol than of all the bullets of the enemy.
-Thomas J. ('Stonewall') Jackson

I got my dog three years ago because I was drunk in a pet store. We had nine cats at the time. The cats started hiding the alcohol after that.
-Paula Poundstone

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

I told my wife that a husband is like a fine wine; he gets better with age. The next day she locked me in the cellar.
-Unattributed

I went to alcohol rehab in wine country, just to keep my options open.
-Robin Williams

I work until beer o'clock.
-Stephen King

I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
-David Sedaris

I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
-Raymond Chandler

I'm not an alcoholic, I only drink two times a year. When it's my birthday, and when it's not my birthday.
-@BillMurray

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.
-Dick Gregory

It's hard to argue with the government. Remember, they run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about satisfying women.
-Scott Adams

Just as natural selection weeds out the weak and infirm making a stronger herd, so does alcohol improve your brain's capabilities by destroying the weaker cells.
-Unattributed

Life is too short to drink the house wine.
-Helen Thomas

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
-Lord Dunsany

Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
-Roy Blount, Jr.

Men are like a fine wine. They start out like grapes, and it's our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you'd like to have dinner with.
-Unattributed

Men like beer and something naked.
-Jeff Foxworthy

Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger

Most vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children. A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussels sprouts never do.
-P.J. O'Rourke

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
-William Faulkner

Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Old wine and an old friend are good provisions.
-George Herbert

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

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
-William S. Burroughs

People who drink light 'beer' don't like the taste of beer; they just like to pee a lot.
-Sign at Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
-Don Marquis

Quickly bring me a beaker of wine
So that I may wet my brain and say something clever.
-Aristophanes

Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.
-N.F. Simpson

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who- who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one.
-Harper Lee

Son, if you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against 'em, you don't deserve to be here.
-U.S. Senator Sam Rayburn

Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.
-St. Thomas Aquinas

The Americans are a funny lot; they drink whiskey to keep them warm; then they put some ice in it to keep it cool; they put some sugar in it to make it sweet; and then they put a slice of lemon in it to make it sour. Then they say 'here's to you' and drink it themselves.
-B.N. Chakravaty

The best brewer sometimes makes bad beer.
-German Proverb

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
-Kingsley Amis

The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism.
-Norman Brenner

There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.
-Baron de Rothschild

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
-Raymond Chandler

They say God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world.
-Kinky Friedman

They who drink beer will think beer.
-Washington Irving

Three most deleterious things of modern life in their present order of importance are: tobacco, alcohol and intemperate eating. Both alcohol and tobacco are taboo in plants.
-Henry Ford

To alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
-(From the TV series The Simpsons)

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
-Eduardo Galeano

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
-Isak Dinesen

When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.
-Joel Stein

White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.
-James Joyce

Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion.
-Ovid

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy.
-Henry Fielding

Wine is sunlight held together by water.
-Galileo

Wine maketh merry; but money answereth all things.
-Ecclesiastes 10:19

With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
-Eugene O'Neill

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
-Frank Zappa

You can't find the answers on the bottom of a whiskey glass, but if you look hard enough you'll forget the questions.
-George Patterson

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(by Charles Barsotti in the New Yorker)

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
-H.L. Mencken

At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end.
-A. Whitney Brown

Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
-John Milton

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.
-Adolf Hitler

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.
-H.L. Mencken

Do not ask God the way to heaven; he will show you the hardest way.
-Stanislaw J. Lec

Either heaven or hell will have continuous background music. Which one you think it will be tells a lot about you.
-Bill Vaughan

Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
-Miguel de Cervantes

Every politician we have, liberal or conservative, who gets caught drinking or chasing women is thrown out of office. It's backwards. It's more dangerous to have a clean-living President with his finger on the button. He thinks he's going right to heaven. You want to feel safe with a leader? Give me a guy who fights in bars and cheats on his wife. This is a man who wants to put off Judgment Day as long as possible.
-Larry Miller

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
-Helen Gurley Brown

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
-David Hume

Heaven for climate, hell for society.
-Mark Twain

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
-Mark Twain

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
-William Congreve

Heaven have mercy on us all- Presbyterians and Pagans alike- for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
-Herman Melville

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
-Edward Abbey

Heaven is like Scotland without the midges... and the Scots, of course.
-From Old Harry's Game, BBC Radio

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
-Henry David Thoreau

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
-William Wordsworth

Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.
-Dante Alighieri

Heaven-A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.
-Ambrose Bierce

Hell is in Heaven and Heaven is in Hell. But angels see only the light, and devils only the darkness.
-Jacob Boehme

How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.
-Robert A. Heinlein

How you gonna go to heaven unless you've danced in hell? I mean how are you gonna know it? How you gonna feel good unless you feel bad?
-Charles Manson

I desire to go to Hell, not to Heaven. In Hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, but in Heaven are only beggars, monks, hermits and apostles.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell- you see, I have friends in both places.
-Mark Twain

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I have faith in the universe, for it is rational. Law underlies each happening. And I have faith in my purpose here on earth. I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time- here and now.
-Albert Einstein

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
-James Thurber

If there are no dogs in heaven, when I die I want to go where they go.
-Will Rogers

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
-George Bernard Shaw

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort; it's not the sort of comfort they supply there.
-C.S. Lewis

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.
-C.S. Lewis

Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
-Paulo Coelho

Men, at most, differ as heaven and earth; But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to get there.
-Steve Jobs

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
-G.C. Lichtenberg

On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.
-Jules Renard

Order is heaven's first law.
-Alexander Pope

People with too much heaven in them are hell to live with.
-Tony Larsen

Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
-John Adams

Retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven.
-Tao Te Ching

Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So trust is not a matter of probabilities. Statistics can't handle a sample of one. Trust is an act of faith. Trust is the gateway to either heaven or hell-and the gate is unmarked. Damn few have gone through.
-Donald Kingsbury

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
-H.L. Mencken

Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence.
-Washington Irving

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
-John Updike

The bottom line is in heaven.
-Edwin H. Land

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.
-Mark Twain

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
-Evelyn Waugh

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
-Augustus William Hare

The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to Heaven, not how Heaven goes.
-Cesare Baronio

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
-John Milton

The only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven.
-Daniel Waters (from the film Heathers)

The outside world doesn't have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home.
-Bette Midler

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
-Mark Twain

The two universal languages on earth are music and silence. They are also the two primary languages of heaven.
-Peter Kreeft

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
-Thomas Carlyle

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To scale great heights, we must come out of the lowest depths. The way to heaven is through hell.
-Herman Melville

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
-Arthur Miller

We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
-George Eliot

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.
-Mark Twain

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.
-Joseph Heller

You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
-Jimi Hendrix

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

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A lapsed Catholic is someone who no longer believes in Hell but knows he's still going there.
-Sean Kelly

A man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open- but even the Devil can't fool a dog.
-Earl Hammer, Jr.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
-George Bernard Shaw

A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
-Ricky Gervais

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
-Victor Hugo

Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
-John Milton

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.
-Adolf Hitler

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.
-Frank Borman

Communists worship the Devil himself. Socialists believe damnation is a good system run by bad people. And liberals want to send everyone to hell because it's warm there in the winter.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Don't tell a man to go to Hell unless you can send him there.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

Easy is the slope to hell.
-Virgil

Either heaven or hell will have continuous background music. Which one you think it will be tells a lot about you.
-Bill Vaughan

Everybody's Hell is different; its not all fire and pain. The real Hell is your life gone wrong.
-Richard Matheson

For each time you say the phrases 'touch base,' 'networking,' or 'bottom line,' you will spend one month in hell.
-Unattributed

He who has money can eat sherbet in hell.
-Lebanese proverb

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
-David Hume

Heaven for climate, hell for society.
-Mark Twain

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
-William Congreve

Hell has no terrors for pagans.
-Arthur Rimbaud

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
-Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
-Frank Sinatra

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
-Dick Gregory

Hell hath no fury like a woman. Why add extraneous details?
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

Hell hath no fury like the lawyer of a woman scorned.
-Unattributed

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
-Robert Frost

Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.
-George Herbert

Hell is in Heaven and Heaven is in Hell. But angels see only the light, and devils only the darkness.
-Jacob Boehme

Hell is other people.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Hell is other people. And those people are French.
-Neal Pollack

How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?
-Lois McMaster Bujold

I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
-Clarence Darrow

I desire to go to Hell, not to Heaven. In Hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, but in Heaven are only beggars, monks, hermits and apostles.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell- you see, I have friends in both places.
-Mark Twain

I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.
-Isaac Asimov

I have faith in the universe, for it is rational. Law underlies each happening. And I have faith in my purpose here on earth. I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time- here and now.
-Albert Einstein

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
-Robert Frost

If I owned Hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell.
-Phillip Henry Sheridan

If there is a hell, it is modeled after junior high.
-Lewis Black

If there is no hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses.
-Billy Sunday

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
-Thomas Merton

If you're going through hell, keep going.
-Winston Churchill

In southern Nevada, there's only a screen door between you and hell.
-Unattributed

Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
-Paulo Coelho

Maybe there is no actual place called Hell. Maybe Hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating sandwiches.
-Jim Carrey

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
-Aldous Huxley

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two- slavery here and hell hereafter.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
-Robert Pirsig

Religion is for those who believe in Hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.
-Unattributed

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
-H.L. Mencken

The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear, cowardice, and revenge.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
-John Milton

The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.
-John Foster

The way to Hell is paved with good intentions.
-Karl Marx

There's a truism that the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions. The corollary is that evil is best known not by its motives but by its methods.
-Eric S. Raymond

The road to Hell is paved with good Samaritans.
-Robert Herrick

The road to Hell is paved with works in progress.
-Philip Roth

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
-C.S. Lewis

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
-Thomas Carlyle

There is no hell. There is only France.
-Frank Zappa

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
-Thomas Merton

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To scale great heights, we must come out of the lowest depths. The way to heaven is through hell.
-Herman Melville

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!' But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.
-John Adams

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
-Oscar Wilde

What fresh hell can this be?
-Dorothy Parker

What if God's a woman? Not only am I going to hell, I'll never know why!
-Adam Ferrara

What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?
-Stephen Hawking

When we preach on hell, we might at least do it with tears in our eyes.
-Dwight L. Moody

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.
-John Henrik Clarke

You won't burn in hell. But be nice anyway.
-Ricky Gervais

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A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

A dog who thinks he is a man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.
-Fran Lebowitz

A fine is a tax for doing wrong; a tax is a fine for doing well.
-Unattributed

A person doesn't know how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it.
-Ann Landers

A society which turns so many of its best and brightest into tax lawyers may be doing something wrong.
-Hoffman F. Fuller

A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.
-George W. Bush

A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.
-Russell B. Long

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.
-Daniel Webster

And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.
-George McGovern

Anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it. No citizen has a moral obligation to assist in maintaining the government.
-J.P. Morgan

Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
-Oscar Wilde

Behind every man who achieves success,
Stands a mother, a wife and the IRS.
-Ethel Jacobson

Being audited by the IRS is like having an autopsy without the benefit of dying.
-Unattributed

Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems.
-Romana Machado

Democracy is mob rule, but with income taxes.
-Unattributed

Doing your taxes is a great way to be reminded that you are unsuccessful, unmarried and childless without having to talk to your mother.
-Bryan Donaldson

Every advantage has its tax.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good software leads to more work. Bad software leads to more work. If there's any time left over from fiddling with software, people spend it on making the tax and legal systems more complicated.
-Bill Westfield

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.
-Bernard Berenson

Gradually, without noticing it, you turn into a Republican and judge everything on the basis of whether or not it will increase your taxes.
-Dave Barry

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene.
-Dave Barry

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.
-Roger Jones

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
-George Bernard Shaw

I owed the government $3,400 in taxes. So I sent them two hammers and a toilet seat.
-Sue Murphy

I prefer liquor store robbers with hungry kids to companies that locate offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.
-Warren Buffett

I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS.
-Robert Bakker (Mr. Bakker is a paleontologist)

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
-Edith Sitwell

I wouldn't mind paying taxes if I knew they were going to a friendly country.
-Dick Gregory

If I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license.
-Ray Romano

If Patrick Henry thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
-The Farmer's Almanac

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
-Will Durant

If the Lord had meant us to pay income taxes, he'd have made us smart enough to prepare the return.
-Kirk Kirkpatrick

In case you didn't know, ethanol is made by mixing corn with your tax dollars.
-Paul A. Gigot

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
-Milton Friedman

Interesting thing about being rich is once you pay your taxes, you're still rich.
-Lewis Black

IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.

-Unattributed (Bumper Sticker)

It's a game. We (tax lawyers) teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich- and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.
-John Grisham

It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.
-Dave Barry

Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten.
-Lord Bramwell

My uncle claims that if he files his income tax wrong he'll go to jail, and if he files it right he'll go to the poor house.
-Nonnee Coan

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is as satisfying as an income tax refund.
-F.J. Raymond

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
-Gore Vidal

On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
-Tom Lehrer

On the whole, I prefer not to be lectured on patriotism by those who keep offshore maildrops in order to avoid paying their taxes.
-Molly Ivins

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes.
-Benjamin Franklin

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home 'owners' deduct mortgage interest payments.
-Florence King

Passive activity income does not include the following: Income from an activity that is not a passive activity.
-(Instructions to IRS Form 8582, Passive Activity Loss Limitations)

People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.
-Will Rogers

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.
-Paul Krugman

Politics is very much like taxes- everybody is against them, or everybody is for them as long as they don't apply to him.
-Fiorello LaGuardia

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.
-Dan Bennett

Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before.
-Art Buchwald

Taxes and golf are alike: you drive your heart out for the green, and then end up in the hole.
-Unattributed

The avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward.
-John Maynard Keynes

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The Eiffel Tower is the Empire State Building after taxes.
-Unattributed

The First Rule of Practicing Tax Law: If someone has to go to jail, make sure it's the client.
-Fred Drasner

The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
-Russell Baker

The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evildoers and tax those who behave.
-E.W. Howe

The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.
-Albert Einstein

The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.
-Barry M. Goldwater

The IRS may take some solace in the fact that Matthew was a tax collector before he became a saint.
-Donald C. Alexander

The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.
-Will Cuppy

The one thing that hurts more than having to pay income tax is not having to pay income tax.
-Thomas R. Dewar

The only civilized country is one in which no man is afraid of the tax collector.
-Juan de Mariana

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
-Will Rogers

The only things in life that you can't avoid are death and taxes. And an occasional pedestrian.
-Perry Friedman

The trick is to stop thinking of it as 'your' money.
(On dealing with the IRS)
-Unattributed

The United States has a system of taxation by confession.
-Hugo Black

The United States is the only country where it takes more brains to figure your tax than to earn the money to pay it.
-Edward J. Gurney

The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it's just a tired feeling.
-Paula Poundstone

The way taxes are, you might as well marry for love.
-Joe E. Lewis

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer space program: your tax dollars will go farther.
-Wernher von Braun

There is untold wealth in America, especially at tax time.
-(Cartoon caption in The Wall Street Journal)

There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little- and it's always somebody else.
-Cullen Hightower

This year I'm going to deduct last year's taxes as a bad investment.
-Unattributed

To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation.
-Jeff Daiell

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.
-Benjamin Disraeli

True, everyone lies, but there's a difference between 'No, those pants don't make your ass look fat, and 'No, there's nothing incriminating in those unreleased tax returns.'
-Kevin G. Barkes

War- after all, what is it that the people get? Why- widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt.
-Samuel B. Pettengill

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
-Mark Twain

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.
-Sam Levenson

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.
-H.L. Mencken

When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the State demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax.'
-Jeff Daiell

When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise 'em. That's statesmanship of the highest order.
-Will Rogers

When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.
-Mae West

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
-Plato

When you come into the world you have nothing... when you leave you have nothing... and in between there's the IRS.
-Bob Thaves

Why does a slight tax increase cost you $200 and a substantial tax cut save you 30 cents?
-Peg Bracken

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In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
-Laurence J. Peter

All useful work is done by individuals who haven't yet reached their level of incompetence.
-Laurence J. Peter

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.
-Laurence J. Peter

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
-Laurence J. Peter

Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.
-Laurence J. Peter

In most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.
-Laurence J. Peter

An incompetent attorney can delay a trail for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
-Evelle J. Younger

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
-Marge Piercy

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-George Bernard Shaw

Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
-John Maynard Keynes

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
-H.L. Mencken

I don't have time to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent.
-General Curtis LeMay

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
-John Cleese

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.
-Maureen Reagan

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
-Edith Sitwell

Incompetence is a double-edged banana.
-John Perry Barlow

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
-Kingsley Amis

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, who can't, and those in cemeteries.
-Everett Dirksen

Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
-Robert J. Hanlon

Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.
-Robert A. Heinlein

One of the chief features of incompetence is an inability to see it in oneself.
-Kim Stanley Robinson

Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.
-H. Beam Piper

Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees who hold their places solely as the reward of partisan service. (1885)
-Grover Cleveland

Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-Boies Penrose

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
-Quentin Crisp

The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition, and incompetence.
-Elbert Hubbard

The supreme crime of the church today is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
-Upton Sinclair

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts.
-Eugene McCarthy

There's nothing wrong with being incompetent. It just means you don't have to do as much.
-Charles Manson

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.
-W.E.B. DuBois

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-Isaac Asimov

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Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our future successes.
-Douglas Adams

Time and space- time to be alone, space to move about- these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.
-Edwin Way Teale

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
-Dorothy Sayers

Time bears away all things, even the mind.
-Virgil

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
-Thomas Mann

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
-Anatole France

Time discovers truth.
-Lucias Annaeus Seneca

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.
-Linda Ellerbee

Time flies when you don't know what you're doing.
-Unattributed

Time flies when you're on Prozac.
-Bette Midler

Time flies. It's up to you to be the navigator.
-Robert Orben

Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.
-Richard Ben Sapir

Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new year. It is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
-Thomas Mann

Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance.
-Leo Buscaglia

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons.
-Blaise Pascal

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
-William Faulkner

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
-Hector Berlioz

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
-Marcus Aurelius

Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.
-Joan D. Vinge

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.
-Jerome K. Jerome

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
-Henry David Thoreau

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
-William Faulkner

Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.
-Horatio Nelson

Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.
-Jawaharlal Nehru

Time is only linear for engineers and referees.
-Craig Ferguson

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
-John Updike

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
-Carl Sandburg

Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.
-Warren Buffett

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
-H.L. Mencken

Time is the great physician.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Time is the longest distance between two places.
-Tennessee Williams

Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens.
-Samuel Gompers

Time is the mother and mugger of us all.
-Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Time is the only critic without ambition.
-John Steinbeck

Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working.
-Unattributed

Time is the rider that breaks youth.
-George Herbert

Time is the storyteller you can't shut up.
-Carl Sandburg

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
-John Archibald Wheeler

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once and space is what keeps it all from happening to you.
-David Gerrold

Time marks us while we are marking time.
-Theodore Roethke

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.
-Dorothy Parker

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
-William Gibson

Time neither moves nor is stationary. Time changes.
-Paulo Coelho

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
-Christopher Hitchens

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.
-Euripides

Time wounds all heels.
-Jane Sherwood Ace

Time's a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all)
--E.E. Cummings

Time's fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat- especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.
-H.P. Lovecraft

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(From www.explainthisimage.com)

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.
-Francois Sagan

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
-Alfred Adler

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
-Rex Stout

Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.
-Ray Bradbury

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
-Robert Frost

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
-Edward Albee

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want- an adorable pancreas?
-Jean Kerr

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
-Ray Bradbury

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
-Philip K. Dick

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be a description without meaning- as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
-Albert Einstein

No sense in being pessimistic. It won't work, anyway.
-Unattributed

No sense makes sense.
-Charles Manson

Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
-W.H. Auden

People who feel the need to tell you that they have an excellent sense of humor are telling you that they have no sense of humor.
-Dave Barry

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
-Carl Sagan

Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Our threat is from the insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions- those institutions we proudly called the American way of life.
-Douglas MacArthur

The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.
-David Mamet

The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.
-Scott Adams

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
-Carl Jung

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
-Bertrand Russell

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
-Robertson Davies

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
-John von Neumann

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
-Alexander Cockburn

This is the sort of pedantic nonsense up with which I shall not put.
-Winston Churchill

Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.
-Thornton Wilder

While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

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A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
-Ogden Nash

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.
-Charles Dickens

Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
-Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society... The foundation of all free government and of all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth.
-Noah Webster

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-Leo Tolstoy

All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once in a long while an extravagance.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

America's a family. We all yell at each other. It all works out.
-Louis C.K.

Americans are fat all year round, but the holidays are when we really hit our stride. And you can bet the food we eat will be just as unhealthy as the families we're forced to visit.
-Lewis Black

Among Republicans, family values seems to be an article of faith, like heaven, rather than an actual way of life.
-John Bonnano

Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Do you want to trace your family tree? Run for public office.
-Patricia H. Vance

Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another- secret and passionate and intense- which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends.
-Willa Cather

Every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
-Mitch Albom

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
-Matt Groening

Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.
-George W. Bush

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
-E.W. Howe

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
-Oscar Wilde

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
-W.H. Auden

Heredity runs in our family.
-Don Marquis

I am not here, of course, as one pretending to any expertness on questions of youth and children- except in the sense that, within their own families, all grandfathers are experts on these matters.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

I come from a big family. As a matter of fact, I never got to sleep alone until I was married.
-Lewis Grizzard

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
-Erma Bombeck

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
-Fred Allen

I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.
-George W. Bush

I'll keep it short and sweet- Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.
-Matt Groening

I've been to all 50 states, and traveled this whole country, and 90 percent of the people are good folks. The rest of them take after the other side of the family.
-Jeff Foxworthy

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
-Quentin Crisp

If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
-John Updike

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you might as well make it dance.
-George Bernard Shaw

If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair.
-Jeff Foxworthy

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.
-Isaac Rosenfeld

In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
-David Mamet

In our family we don't divorce our men, we bury them.
-Ruth Gordon

It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born. This is not necessarily cause for alarm. The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money.
-Elinor Goulding Smith

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
-Quentin Crisp

The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial.
-G.K. Chesterton

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-George Santayana

The family is our refuge and our springboard; nourished on it, we can advance to new horizons.
-Alex Haley

The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.
-Ring Lardner

The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
-Evan Esar

There is no such thing as 'fun for the whole family.'
-Jerry Seinfeld

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
-E.B. White

When someone asks if I'm the black sheep of the family I always say no, we're all black sheep.
-Sarah Vowell

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
-Alex Haley

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?
-Peter De Vries

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
-Clare Boothe Luce

You should come from a good family, because while breeding isn't everything, it is said to be lots of fun.
-Gracie Allen

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(Today is also the birthday of Clare Boothe Luce)

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A mission statement is defined as 'a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly.' All good companies have one.
-Scott Adams

All good work is done in defiance of management.
-Bob Woodward

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but management won't pay a penny for it.
-Gerald Weinberg

Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.
-Dan Quayle

Catching people doing things right is a powerful management concept.
-Ken Blanchard

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-Doug Larson

Eighty percent of good management is hiring the right people. The other 20 percent is getting out of their way.
-Scott Adams

Engineering without management is art.
-Jeff Johnson

Every layer of management exists for the sole purpose of warning us about the layer above.
-Scott Adams

I fire staff regularly, sometimes for no reason at all. Terror is a marvelous, often underutilized management tool.
-(From the magazine Forbes FYI)

I learned about stress management from my kids. Every night after work, I drink some chocolate milk, eat sugary cereal straight from the box, then run around the house in my underwear screaming like a monkey.
-Randy Glasbergen

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.
-Jean Giraudoux

If at first you don't succeed, try management.
-Unattributed

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of management.
-Unattributed

It's a lot easier to fake good management than to fake good code.
-Unattributed

It's vital for employees to accept the 'buy-in' process. That way management has someone to blame when things go wrong.
-Scott Adams

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
-Peter Drucker

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
-Stephen Covey

Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.
-Harry S. Truman

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
-Peter Drucker

Sometimes when I get direction from management I have to stop, take a deep breath, and ask myself, 'What would MacGyver do in a situation like this?'
-Unattributed

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.
-Robert Heller

The trick of management is finding people with the right demons.
-David Carlson

When people stare at you in disbelief, do you repeat what you just said, only louder and slower? Good, you're management material.
-Scott Adams

You cannot manage a man into combat; you must lead him. You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership.
-Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

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Hollywood is a factory. You have to realize that you are working in a factory and you're part of the mechanism. If you break down, you'll be replaced.
-Mel Gibson

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
-Fred Allen

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and 50 cents for your soul.
-Marilyn Monroe

Hollywood is a place where you either ride in a Rolls Royce or are run over by one.
-Gene Fowler

Hollywood is full of genius. And all it lacks is talent.
-Henri Bernstein

Hollywood is Hollywood. There's nothing you can say about it that isn't true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter- you're the one who sat down, and joined the game.
-Orson Welles

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.
-Liv Ullman

Hollywood is making, because of costs, fewer interesting films. So, basically you end up with a lot of explosions.
-William Goldman

Hollywood is the kind of town where they stick a knife in your back and then arrest you for carrying a concealed weapon.
-Raymond Chandler

Hollywood is where they write the alibis before they write the story.
-Carole Lombard

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
-Raymond Chandler

Hollywood's a great place to live... if you're a grapefruit.
-Rod Serling

Hollywood, where the stars are in the sidewalk and the dirt is in the sky.
-Bill Maher

Hollywood: that's where they give Academy Awards to Charlton Heston for acting.
-Shirley Knight

Hollywood: They only know one word of more than one syllable there, and that is 'fillum.'
-Louis Sherwin

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A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.
-Eric Hoffer

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

Aim for success, not perfection.
-Dr. David M. Burns

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
-Emile Zola

Don't expect perfect products unless you are willing to pay for perfection.
-Robert Siegmeister

Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.
-James Stephens

Have no fear of perfection- you'll never reach it.
-Salvador Dali

History balances the frustration of 'how far we have to go' with the satisfaction of 'how far we have come.' It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.
-Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.
-Anatole France

I remember what it is like to be in love before any of love's complexities or realities or disturbances has entered in, to dilute its splendor and challenge its perfection.
-E.B. White

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.
-Leo Tolstoy

Imperfections create character.
-Ellen Hopkins

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
-Hannah Arendt

It is not given to us to right every wrong, to make perfect all the imperfections of the world. But neither is it given to us to sit content in our storehouses- dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. We are simply not doing enough.
-Robert F. Kennedy

No man is entirely free from weakness and imperfection in this life. Men of the most exalted genius and active minds are generally most perfect slaves to the love of fame. They sometimes descend to as mean tricks and artifices in pursuit of honor or reputation as the miser descends to in pursuit of gold.
-John Adams

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.
-Edith Schaeffer

Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.
-Alfred de Musset

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Perfection is a waste of time.
-Kim De Coite

Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem- in my opinion- to characterize our age.
-Albert Einstein

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.
-John Locke

The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind. All work of the mind is superior in proportion as the mind that produces it is universal.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
-George Orwell

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.
-Brooks Atkinson

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

The maxim 'Nothing but perfection' may be spelled 'Paralysis.'
-Winston Churchill

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
-George F. Will

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
-H.G. Wells

To obey orders is all perfection.
-Horatio Nelson

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo

We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.
-Martha Washington

We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection.
-Stephen Vizinczey

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Every love is the love before
In a duller dress.
-Dorothy Parker

If love is blind, why is Victoria's Secret so successful?
-Unattributed

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
-Jane Wagner

Life is one fool thing after another where as love is two fool things after each other.
-Oscar Wilde

Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
-Franklin P. Jones

Love is a decision, not an emotion.
-Unattributed

Love is a joint experience between two persons- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.
-Carson McCullers

Love is a matter of chemistry. Sex is a matter of physics.
-Unattributed

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig, and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
-Matt Groening

Love is a series
Of darlings and dearies
Of honeys and sweeties
And sugared entreaties
Of moonings and spoonings
And cooings and billings
All tempered, of course,
By occasional killings.
-E.Y. Harburg

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
-Matt Groening

Love is a verb.
-Clare Boothe Luce

Love is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets pregnant.
-Jim Cole

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn.
-James Thurber

Love is grand; divorce is three hundred grand.
-Unattributed

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
-Jules Renard

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.
-Anthony Trollope

Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it, the more likely one is to contract it.
-Nicolas Chamfort

Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.
-Jerome K. Jerome

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin- it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
-S.J. Perelman

Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
-Unattributed

Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Love is that rare attraction to someone that can survive getting to know them.
-Robert Brault

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-H.L. Mencken

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.
-John Ciardi

Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage, friends, is a lifelong feast, love is no light lunch.
-Garrison Keillor

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
-Dorothy Parker

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
-Hermann Hesse

Puppy love is no laughing matter when you're a puppy.
-Amy Gamerman

The best proof of love is trust.
-Dr. Joyce Brothers

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
-Anaïs Nin

The first duty of love is to listen.
-Paul Tillich

The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
-Antoine Bret

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
-H.L. Mencken

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
-Benjamin Disraeli

True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.
-William Goldman

When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.
-P.G. Wodehouse

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(Today is also the birthday of William S. Burroughs)

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
-John Updike

A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.
-Jean Baptiste Moliere

Adapt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

All human power is a compound of time and patience.
-Honoré de Balzac

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.
-Cleveland Amory

Elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may seem superb- such power and such restraint, combined, are noble- but a quality carried to excess defeats itself.
-Clarence Day

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
-John Ruskin

Endurance is the crowning quality, and patience all the passion of great hearts.
-James Russell Lowell

Fear both the heat and the cold of your heart, and try to have patience, if you can.
-J.R.R. Tolkien

Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.
-Laurence J. Peter

Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
-George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
-Hyman Rickover

Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.
-Abigail Adams

If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
-Jimmy Breslin

In an instant age, perhaps we must relearn the ancient truth that patience, too, has its victories.
-Konrad Adenauer

In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
-W.B. Prescott

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
-Pauline Kael

Laziness is often mistaken for patience. (French Proverb)
-Unattributed

Lord, grant me the patience to suffer fools, or, alternatively, a chainsaw.
-Unattributed

Men disappoint me so, I disappoint myself so, yet courage, patience, shuffle the cards...
-Margaret Fuller

Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.
-George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

Our patience will achieve more than our force.
-Edmund Burke

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

Patience is often merely the guise of Cowardice.
-C. Lee Hopkin

Patience is something to admire in the driver behind you but scorn in the one ahead.
-Mac McCleary

Patience is the companion of wisdom.
-Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine)

Patience isn't a virtue, it's a tactic.
-Unattributed

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
-W.H. Auden

Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
-Margaret Fuller

The greatest power is often simple patience.
-E. Joseph Cossman

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
-William H. Borah

The office of President requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, and the endurance of an early Christian.
-Woodrow Wilson

The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real application in life. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
-Michael Shermer

The remote control changed our lives... The remote control took over the timing of the world. That's why you have road rage. You have people who have no patience, because you got immediate gratification. You got click, click, click, click. If it doesn't explode within three seconds, click click, click.
-Sid Caesar

The strongest of all warriors are these two- Time and Patience.
-Leo Tolstoy

The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
-Larry Wall

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...
-Walt Whitman

When, in the late 1940s, we faced a global Cold War against another system of ideological fanatics certain that their authoritarian values would eventually rule the world, we prevailed in time. We prevailed because we exercised patience as well as vigilance, self-restraint as well as self-defense, and reached out to moderates and modernists, to democrats and dissidents, within that closed system.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

Who teaches you tolerance? Maybe sometimes your children teach you patience, but always your enemy will teach you tolerance. So your enemy is really your teacher.
-Tenzin Gyatso (The Dalai Lama)

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
-Franklin P. Jones

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(Today is also the birthday of William S. Burroughs)

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A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.
-Pauline Kael

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.
-Dave Barry

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.
-Arnold J. Toynbee

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
-Saul Bellow

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
-Anaïs Nin

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
-Søren Kierkegaard

Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.
-Thomas Szasz

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
-Boris Pasternak

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.
-Søren Kierkegaard

Early in life, I was visited by the bluebird of anxiety.
-Woody Allen

He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconstant, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.
-Benedict Spinoza

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.
-H.H. Munro Saki

I'm a firm believer in anxiety and the power of negative thinking.
-Gertrude Berg

In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.
-Warren G. Harding

In the US the people are blinkered by the millions of flags that flutter on the forest of poles and hang from every other window. They block the political view and the thunder of their flapping means that even anxious questions, let alone protests, cannot, will not, be heard.
-Phillip Adams

It is a general error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
-Edmund Burke

It is said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.
-Charles H. Spurgeon

Laugh at your worries and insecurities. View your anxieties with humor.
-Paulo Coelho

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
-Sigmund Freud

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

My anxieties have anxieties.

(In the comic strip Peanuts)
-Charles M. Schulz

No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.
-Paul Goodman

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.
-Marshall McLuhan

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.
-Lawrence Durrell

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.
-Benjamin Disraeli

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
-Sigmund Freud

The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.
-Eric Sevareid

The media no longer hesitant to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
-A.C. Grayling

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.
-Richard Jeni

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.
-Abraham Lincoln

We still proclam the old ideals of liberty but we cannot voice them without anxiety in our hearts. The question is no longer one of establishing democratic institutions but of preserving them.
-Charles Evans Hughes

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
-George Dennison Prentice

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Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
-Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

All parts of the human body get tired eventually- except the tongue.
-Konrad Adenauer

Arcane knowledge can be useful, even though its acquisition can seem pointless. That funny-looking key you picked up a few years ago might eventually unlock a door leading to a totally unexpected opportunity.
-Kevin G. Barkes

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.
-Peter Ustinov

Eventually all the things you acquire by dishonesty are gone, and you are left with only your dishonesty.
-Robert Brault

Eventually you realize that the reason God didn't always answer your prayers is that He was answering your mom's prayers.
-Robert Brault

Eventually you realize that your mom knows exactly who you are and has been trying to break it to you gently all your life.
-Robert Brault

Eventually, somebody is going to be a hero, and somebody's going to be president. Not necessarily the same person.
-Howard Baker, Jr.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
-Eric Hoffer

Fashion is about eventually being naked.
-Vivienne Westwood

I believe that every dark cloud has a silver lining that contains abnormally high traces of mercury which will eventually lead to the onset of neurological disorders.
-Dennis Miller

I'll feel that horrible feeling in my stomach you get when you've gone over to the Dark Side. But I'll be fine. That's the good thing about the Dark Side. Eventually, your eyes adjust.
-James Lileks

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.
-John A. Banker

If you locked William Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough, he'd eventually write all the songs by the Monkees.
-Unattributed

If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason.
-Mort Sahl

In my experience, the trouble with oaths of the form, 'death before dishonor,' is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn. It's a survivor's problem, this one.
-Lois McMaster Bujold

In the old days, quality was just an empty word meaning 'good.' Eventually, it evolved into a complicated method for transferring your money to business consultants.
-Scott Adams

It is inevitable, that eventually the people will demand absolute security from the state... And absolute security is absolute slavery.
-Taylor Caldwell

Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like.
-Unattributed

Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
-Will Durant

Man can be chained but he cannot be domesticated, and eventually he always breaks his chains.
-Robert A. Heinlein

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids.
-Bill Cosby

Our elections are free, it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-Bill Stern

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
-Edward R. Murrow

The political spectrum isn't a line so much as a circle, and no matter which direction you head from 12 o'clock, you eventually wind up on the bottom by the hatch where the cuckoos pop out.
-Tamara K (Indiana blogger)

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive, and eventually releases him again for another chance.
-Peter De Vries

There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me.'
-Philip K. Dick

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
-Nikola Tesla

We had a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually.
-Steven Wright

We have all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
-R. Wilensky

When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
-Rita Rudner

When the remodeling contractor points out that Rome wasn't built in a day, it is necessary to point out that Rome was, eventually, built.
-James Lileks

When you actually meet the devil and he offers you a deal most artists eventually negotiate.
-Marc Maron

When, in the late 1940s, we faced a global Cold War against another system of ideological fanatics certain that their authoritarian values would eventually rule the world, we prevailed in time. We prevailed because we exercised patience as well as vigilance, self-restraint as well as self-defense, and reached out to moderates and modernists, to democrats and dissidents, within that closed system.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

You can only work with mirrors for so long, and eventually the reality hits.
-Bob Olstein

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Money alone determines your entire life, political as well as private.
-Germaine de Stael

Money alone sets all the world in motion.
-Publilius Syrus

Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
-Louis L'Amour

Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.
-Kinky Friedman

Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.
-Clare Boothe Luce

Money can't buy love, but it can definitely rent by the hour.
-Kathy Lette

Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.
-Laurence J. Peter

Money can't buy you friends, but you do get a better class of enemy.
-Spike Milligan

Money can't buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot more places.
-Milton Berle

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
-Dorothy Parker

Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
-Sean O'Casey

Money doesn't buy class.
-Andy Rooney

Money doesn't talk, it swears.
-Bob Dylan

Money is a poor man's credit card.
-Marshall McLuhan

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
-P.T. Barnum

Money is always there, but the pockets change.
-Gertrude Stein

Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.
-William Randolph Hearst

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-Woody Allen

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
-Frederico Fellini

Money is how people with no talent keep score.
-Unattributed

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Money is like a sixth sense-and you can't make use of the other five without it.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and it enlivens the other who turns it upon his fellow man.
-Kahlil Gibran

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.
-Francis Bacon

Money is only unused power. The real purpose of wealth, after food, clothing and shelter, is philanthropy.
-Leon Levy

Money is the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it.
-Henry Fielding

Money is the power of the impotent.
-Leon Samson

Money is the root of all evil. Man needs roots.
-Unattributed

Money is what people without talent use to keep score.
-Jeremy C. Epworth

Money isn't everything but it sure keeps you in touch with your children.
-J. Paul Getty

Money isn't everything: usually it isn't even enough.
-Unattributed

Money often costs too much.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money tends to make you stupid.
-H. Ross Perot

Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.
-Groucho Marx

Money will ruin the life of any man who treats it like anything but a tool with which to work.
-Henry Ford

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
-Henry James

Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
-Anton Chekhov

Today is also the birthday of the late author, filmmaker, professor and political activist Susan Sontag (d. December 28, 2004)

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Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.
-Doug Larson

Almost nothing is impossible if you put the screws to the right people.
-Unattributed

As you accumulate more history you get more interested in history, but the great benefit of youth is that you don't have to forget that stuff is impossible.
-Bruce Sterling

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
-Bette Davis

Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.
-Javier Pascual Salcedo

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.
-Graham Greene

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
-Edwin H. Land

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it's done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
-Robert A. Heinlein

How many seemingly impossible things have been accomplished by resolute men because they had to do, or die.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.
-Lewis Mumford

I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
-John Cleese

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
-Honoré de Balzac

In France, only the impossible is admired.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

It always seems impossible until it's done.
-Nelson Mandela

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
-Jim Bishop

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.
-Cecil B. DeMille

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
-William Saroyan

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
-Thomas Paine

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
-William G. McAdoo

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
-T.S. Eliot

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
-Jerome K. Jerome

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
-H.L. Mencken

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
-Muriel Spark

It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.
-Jean de la Fontaine

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.
-Charles Peguy

It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless.
-Benito Mussolini

It is totally impossible to be well dressed in cheap shoes.
-Hardy Amies

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
-Yogi Berra

It's absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.
-Samuel Goldwyn

It's either easy or impossible.
-Salvador Dali

It's impossible to know accurately how you look in your sunglasses.
-George Carlin

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
-Walt Disney

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
-H.L. Mencken

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
-Oscar Wilde

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.
-G.M. Trevelyan

Nothing is impossible for pure love.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

Nothing is impossible for those who don't have to do it.
-Unattributed

Nothing is impossible to a determined woman.
-Louisa May Alcott

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.
-Jonathan Winters

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
-Lewis Mumford

Only those who attempt the absurd...will achieve the impossible.
-M.C. Escher

People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
-A.A. Milne

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
-Christopher Reeve

Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.
-Doug Larson

The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
-Agatha Christie

The impossible is often the untried.
-Jim Goodwin

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
-Douglas Adams

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
-Arthur C. Clarke

The opposite of nature is impossible.
-Buckminster Fuller

The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
-E.F. Schumacher

The trouble with you and me... is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.
-Leonard Bernstein

The word impossible is not French.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.
-Pearl S. Buck

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
-Paulo Coelho

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.
-Christopher Reeve

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-Arthur C. Clarke

When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you're going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

When someone tells you nothing is impossible, ask him to dribble a football.
-Unattributed

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
-Isak Dinesen

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Who is the bigger fool? The fool who demands the impossible or the fool who comes in on weekends to do it?
-Craig Bruce

Woman's one comfort is that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture one.
-H.L. Mencken

(Today is also the birthday of Richard M. Nixon)

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May this arbitrary, transient aspect of your solipsistic discernment of the space-time continuum delineate the initiation of a procession of random events which trend in a manner you perceive as favorable.
-Kevin G. Barkes

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
-Bill Vaughan

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
-Benjamin Franklin

Celebrate what you want to see more of.
-Tom Peters

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
-Brooks Atkinson

Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?
-Ogden Nash

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
-T.S. Eliot

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
-Oscar Wilde

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.
-F.M. Knowles

I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.
-Horace Mann

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.
-Anaïs Nin

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.
-Henry Moore

Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year's resolutions, and I've stuck with it ever since.
-Dave Beard

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.
-Joey Adams

New Year's Day... now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
-Mark Twain

New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
-James Agate

New Years Eve: when the beautiful promise of tomorrow is transformed into the ugly reality of today, and the disgusting miasma of now becomes the rosy nostalgic netherworlds of yesterday.
-J.C. Duffy

Resolutions, like the good, die young.
-Fulton J. Sheen

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new year. It is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
-Thomas Mann

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
-Hal Borland

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
-Mark Twain

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
-Helen Keller

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
-Bill Vaughan

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The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen, and quotes about hydrogen and stupidity.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-Bertrand Russell

A TV program can never be worse than its viewers; for the more stupid it is, the more stupid they are to watch it.
-Clive James

Above all, if what you've done is stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.
-Robert Fulghum

Against stupidity, the very gods themselves contend in vain.
-Friedrich von Schiller

Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you.
-J. Michael Straczynski

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
-Victor Hugo

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
-Hedy Lamarr

Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
-Unattributed

Avaritia Facit Bardus. (Greed makes you stupid.)
-(Credo of refdesk.com)

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
-Leo Tolstoy

Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization.
-Jon Bentley

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
-H.L. Mencken

Conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.
-Brian E. Moore

Contrary to what people may say, there's no upper limit to stupidity.
-Stephen Colbert

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
-Edwin H. Land

Darwin's Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. (corollary to Occam's Razor)
-Dan Simmons

Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy.
-Dan O'Neill

Early risers are conceited in the morning and stupid in the afternoon.
-Rose Henniker Heaton

Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
-Jean Giraudoux

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
-Frank Leahy

Freedom means the right to be stupid.
-Penn Jillette

From stupidity there is always something to be learned, but it's always the same thing: don't be stupid.
-Robert M. Adams

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
-Elbert Hubbard

Good generally conquers evil. Unless, of course, good is stupid.
-Unattributed

Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
-Dean Koontz

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
-Edith Sitwell

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.
-Steve Martin

I don't care what people think. People are stupid.
-Charles Barkley

I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.
-Henrik Ibsen

I don't think for a moment that Americans are inherently more stupid or brain-dead than anyone else. It's just that they are routinely provided with conditions that spare them the need to think, so they have got out of the habit.
-Bill Bryson

I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
-Oscar Wilde

I know your little fourth grade teacher said there are no stupid questions. She was wrong. This is the Internet.
-Unattributed

I like to think of my behavior in the Sixties as a "learning experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid.
-P.J. O'Rourke

I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.
-Bette Midler

I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.
-Dorothy Parker

I think the problem with people like this (Sarah Palin) is that they are so stupid, that they have no idea how stupid they are.
-John Cleese

I think we can agree racial prejudice is stupid. Because if you spend time with someone from another race and really get to know them, you can find other reasons to hate them.
-Bernadette Luckett

I'll take crazy over stupid any day.
-Joss Whedon

I'm not implying you are stupid. I observed your behavior, formulated a hypothesis, then tested and confirmed that hypothesis by listening to you. You are stupid. (Internet post)
-Unattributed

If God invented marathons to keep people from doing anything more stupid, triathlon must have taken Him completely by surprise.
-P.Z. Pearce

If honesty really is the best policy then why don't people appreciate it when I tell them how stupid they are?
-Olivia Ramsey

If it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid.
-Unattributed

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
-Will Rogers

If we're looking for the source 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

If wicked actions are atoned for only in the next world, stupid ones are only atoned for in this.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

If you do something and people think you're stupid, just go for crazy. You get more respect that way because nobody likes stupid people.
-Louis C.K.

In a democracy, the votes of the vicious and stupid count. On the other hand, in any other system, they might be running the show. (from The Boston Globe)
-Unattributed

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.
-Dave Barry

In nature, stupidity gets you killed. In the workplace, it gets you fired. In politics, it gets you re-elected.
-Bill VanRemmen

In science, it doesn't matter if you're wrong, as long as you're not stupid. In business, it doesn't matter if you're stupid, so long as you're not wrong.
-Unattributed

In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.
-Dean Acheson

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

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.
-Jerome K. Jerome

It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.
-Antonin Scalia

It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
-David Harris

It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful.
-Anton Szandor LaVey

Let us say that I despise stupidity. Especially when it masquerades as virtue.
-Miguel de Cervantes

Life is tough. It's even tougher if you're stupid.
-John Wayne

Like most intellectuals, he is immensely stupid.
-Marquise de Merteuil

Many learned persons have read themselves stupid.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business; they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
-Pauline Kael

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
-Bertrand Russell

Money tends to make you stupid.
-H. Ross Perot

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But remember, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
-Unattributed

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Think about it. People aren't out to get you, they're just stupid.
-Jane Espenson

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one- until you can show it isn't you.
-M.N. Plano

Never underestimate the power of a lot of stupid people working in the same company.
-Karen Boucher

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
-Unattributed

Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
-Paul Goodman

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

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
-C.S. Lewis

Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

On some deeper level, science fiction writers truly are cultural allies of scientists. We have a whole lot of the same enemies, and anyone who wants to hurt them, wants to hurt us. Also, we both get all depressed when we see stupid people being happy.
-Bruce Sterling

Once the XFL was canceled for not being stupid enough, it was clear that America's internal enemies had already triumphed.
-P.J. O'Rourke

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
-Bertrand Russell

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be "too clever by half." The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.
-John Major

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
-Heinrich Heine

Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.
-Carl Sagan

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
-Bertrand Russell

Politics is about compromises... really stupid compromises.
-Bill Maher

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?
-Jules Renard

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
-Saul Bellow

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
-Dee Hock

Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.
-Margaret Sanger

Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.
-Rita Rudner

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
-Stephen Vizinczey

Stupid people shouldn't breed.
-Unattributed

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.
-Aaron Sorkin

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
-Albert Camus

Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it.
-Pope John Paul II

Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But you still don't want to get any on you.
-Scott Adams

Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere. (sign)
-Unattributed

Stupidity is replicating itself at an enormous rate. The person who stands up and says, "This is stupid," either is asked to "behave" or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful, "Yes, we know! Isn't it terrific!"
-Frank Zappa

Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Stupidity, thy name is the Texas House of Representatives.
-Molly Ivins

Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
-Sloan Wilson

The American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
-Will Rogers

The better the actor the more stupid he is.
-Truman Capote

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.
-Gamel Abdel Nasser

The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
-Art Spander

The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid.
-Richard Braunstein

The initial objective of problem solving is not to solve the problem but to keep from doing something stupid.
-Ron Evans

The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
-A. Kindsvater

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
-Unattributed

The problem with the world is there are too many stupid people and nobody to eat 'em.
-Carlos Mencia

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
-Richard P. Feynman

The stupid have an answer for every question.
-Unattributed

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
-Thomas Szasz

The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

The supreme crime of the church today is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
-Upton Sinclair

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
-Thomas Szasz

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
-Harlan Ellison

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. (From the TV series Dr. Who.)
-Unattributed

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
-Gustave Flaubert

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
-Lois McMaster Bujold

The world is just filling up with more and more idiots! And the computer is giving them access to the world! They're spreading their stupidity! At least they were contained before- now they're on the loose everywhere!
-Harlan Ellison

There are no stupid questions, but there a lot of inquisitive idiots.
-Larry Kersten, PhD

There are only two ways by which to rise in this world, either by one's own industry or by the stupidity of others.
-Jean de la Bruyere

There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.
-Charles Caleb Colton

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
-Frank Zappa

There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
-Gene Wolfe

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
-Robertson Davies

There is no sin except stupidity.
-Oscar Wilde

There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
-G.K. Chesterton

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-Gustave Flaubert

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

We're called rebels because we're easily manipulated into doing stupid things.
-Scott Adams

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
-George Bernard Shaw

When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.
-David Frum

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motive.
-Oscar Wilde

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
-Thomas Carlyle

You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
-P.J. O'Rourke

You can be sincere and still be stupid.
-Unattributed

You can't fix stupid.
-Ron White

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
-Charles de Gaulle

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, drunkenness sobered, but stupidity lasts forever.
-Unattributed

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(Today is also the birthday of Frank Sinatra.)

Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer widely considered one of the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises in which we have failed.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Sadness is a vice.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

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All of you, I am sure, have heard many cries about Government interference with business and about "creeping socialism." I should like to remind the gentlemen who make these complaints that if events had been allowed to continue as they were going prior to March 4, 1933, most of them would have no businesses left for the Government or for anyone else to interfere with- and almost surely we would have socialism in this country, real socialism. (in 1950)
-Harry S. Truman

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.
-Benjamin Franklin

Complaining about not getting the latest version of Windows is like complaining about not getting the latest version of influenza.
-James Nicoll

Complaints will always discredit you. Rather than compassion and consolation, they provoke passion and insolence, and encourage those who hear our complaints to behave like those we complain about. Once divulged to others, the offenses done to us seem to make others pardonable. Some complain of past offenses and give rise to future ones.
-Baltasar Gracián

Everyone complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

For 50,000 years, ever since mankind invented fire, the wheel and recently the microprocessor, he has been striving endlessly to make himself 100 percent redundant. Now, when at least some of us are teetering on the verge of success, why all the trivial complaints about the high level of unemployment?
-Reginald James Edwards

For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea.
-Enoch Powell

I hate to complain...No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.
-Abigail Adams

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.
-Joyce Carey

I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? "Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep."
-Margo Kaufman

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
-Maya Angelou

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
-George Orwell

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-Jeff Raskin

Instead of complaining because you don't get what you want, be thankful you don't get what you deserve. (Finnish Proverb)
-Unattributed

Ironically, those people that complain of boredom tend to be incredibly boring people.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

It is a general error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
-Edmund Burke

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
-John von Neumann

It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
-Jane Wagner

Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.
-Benny Hill

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Never complain and never explain.
-Benjamin Disraeli

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
-Thomas Sowell

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
-Søren Kierkegaard

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.
-Lou Holtz

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
-Quentin Crisp

The only people with a right to complain about what I do for a living [fur trapper] are vegetarian nudists.
-Ken Bates

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.
-Walter Lippmann

The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
-Randall Jarrell

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.
-James Maxwell

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable...in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Those who do not complain are never pitied.
-Jane Austen

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
-Jean de la Bruyere

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

We pretend so that we might be loved, then complain that we are not loved for who we are.
-Robert Brault

When politicians complain that TV turns proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
-Edward R. Murrow

When teenagers complain that they want to be treated like human beings, it's usually because they are being treated like human beings. (From the film Heathers)
-Daniel Waters

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
-George Wallace

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month I can be myself.
-Roseanne

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[A] computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
-Bill Bryson

A computer cuts your work in half and gives you back the bloody stumps.
-Unattributed

A computer is only as good as the people who are employed to replace the people who were made redundant by the computer.
-Unattributed

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
-Mitch Ratcliffe

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
-(If Error Messages Were Haiku, www.pcpoetry.com)

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
-Leslie Lamport

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
-Bill Gray

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.
-Alan Kay

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
-Unattributed

All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.
-Neil Gaiman

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
-David Ross Brower

An idiot with a computer is a faster, better idiot.
-Rich Julius

Any idiot can use a computer. Many do.
-Unattributed

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem.
-David Wheeler

Any research done on how to efficiently use computers has been long lost in the mad rush to upgrade systems to do things that aren't needed by people who don't understand what they are really supposed to do with them.
-Graham Reed

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-James Klass

Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in movies.
-Unattributed

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
-Unattributed

As practiced by computer science, the study of programming is an unholy mixture of mathematics, literary criticism, and folklore.
-B.A. Sheil

Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim.
-Unattributed

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
-Unattributed

Bad command or file name. Good typing, though.
(Computer error message)-Unattributed

Bad things come in threes. However, when dealing with computers, the fourth thing is always the start of the next group of three.
-Unattributed

Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire.
-James Angove

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

Computer Science: A study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter.
-Stan Kelly-Bootle

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
-Joseph Campbell

Computers are man's attempt at designing a cat: it does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and rarely ever at the right time.
-Unattributed

Computers are such time-saving devices. In fact, I've just spent the last three years trying to print out an envelope.
-Elayne Boosler

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.
-Marshall McLuhan

Computers can now keep a man's every transgression recorded in a permanent memory bank, duplicating with complex programming and intricate wiring a feat his wife handles quite well without fuss or fanfare.
-Lane Olinghouse

Computers can still barely open a printer port, much less the pod bay doors.
-Lee Gomes

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
-Andy Rooney

Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate it when you do that.
-Unattributed

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to virgins.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.
-Unattributed (From Engineers Explained)

Enter any eleven-digit prime number to continue.
-Unattributed (Computer command prompt)

Even though today's technology provides us with mountains of data, it is useless without judgment.
-Felix G. Rohatyn

Every time you turn on your new car, you're turning on 20 microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you're using a computer. Every time I use a set top box or game machine, I'm using a computer. The only computer you don't know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?
-Scott McNealy

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-Alice Kahn

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman,
in his analysis of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. Academy Award winner William Hurt portrays Dr. Feynman in "The Challnger Disaster," a drama based on the late Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist's final book, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" If you missed last night's premiere, it will be rebroadcast again tonight at 9 pm on The Science Channel.

Having a computer is like having a small, silicon version of Gary Busey on your desk. You never know what's going to happen.
-Bill Maher

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
-Buckminster Fuller

I have a computer, a vibrator and pizza delivery. Why should I leave the house?
-Unattributed

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
-Bjarne Stroustrup

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
-Stephen Hawking

I think everyone in this country should learn to program a computer. Everyone should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. I think of computer science as a liberal art.
-Steve Jobs

I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list.
-Leonard Bernstein

I was shocked upon viewing Internet porn while surfing the Web last night. Then I realized my wife must have wired the mouse on our computer.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.
-Samuel P. Ginder

If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now.
-Carlo de Benedetti (re: regulation of information technology.)

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
-Freeman Dyson

If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
-Unattributed

If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a computer.
-Unattributed

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it.
-Pierre Gallois

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-Jeff Raskin

In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until it's too late.
-Bruce Sterling

In all technologically 'advanced' countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
-W.H. Auden

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-Brian K. Reid

In the computer business, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
-Unattributed

In the long run, everything is a toaster.
-Bruce Greenwald (on innovative technologies)

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
-Douglas Adams

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, "My God, what have I done?"
-Ursula K. LeGuin

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-Bruce Sterling

Let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.
-Bill Bryson

Levitt's First Law of Information Technology: If it's free, adopt it.
-Unattributed

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

Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-Seymour Cray (re: computer virtual memory)

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
-A.C. Grayling

Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
-Alan Kay

My perception was/is that while the rest of the computer world was striving for Fault Tolerant Software, Microsoft was working on Fault Tolerant Users.
-John Robinson

Never let a computer know you're in a hurry.
-Unattributed

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
-Steve Wozniak

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-Albert Einstein

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
-Isaac Asimov

PCMCIA stands for either Personal Computer Memory Card International Association or People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
-Unattributed

Read, read, read and put away computers. Forget the Internet, that's all crap.
-Ray Bradbury

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.
-Donald Knuth

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.
-Stan Kelly-Bootle

Some technologies do their job perfectly and tend to stick around. The spoon is one example, the lawn-roller another. Paper may well be a third.
-Unattributed (From The Economist)

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.
-Clare Boothe Luce

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
-Aldous Huxley

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.
-Max Frisch

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers- which is why almost no technology ever works.
-John Cleese

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
-Alan Kay

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
-Unattributed

Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
-Thomas Merton

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-John Tudor

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.
-Laurie Anderson

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
-Jerry Pournelle

The British don't make computers because they never figured out how to make them leak oil.
-Unattributed

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
-Robert Pirsig

The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.
-Jeff Meyer

The computer industry is a chicken on growth hormones, sloshing around in a nutrient bath with its head cut off.
-Peter Sugarman

The computer is a moron.
-Peter Drucker

The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.
-Alan Kay

The computer saves man a lot of guesswork, but so does the bikini.
-Evan Esar

The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.
-Jamais Cascio

The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography.
-Unattributed

The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-Roger Levian

The first time a person gets a screwdriver, he's going to go around the house tightening all the screws, whether they need it or not. There's no reason a computer will not be similarly abused.
-Theodore K. Robb

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
-Unattributed

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself-either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.
-Max Born

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
-Alan Kay

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
-Nathaniel Borenstein

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
-Edward R. Murrow

The only thing God didn't do to Job was give him a computer.
-I.F. Stone

The only truly portable computer language is profanity.
-Unattributed

The power to hurt... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.
-Roger Zelazny

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
-Alan Kay

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-E.O. Wilson

The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in "Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire" and the computer will ask, "Specify type of goat."
-Richard Jeni

The world is just filling up with more and more idiots! And the computer is giving them access to the world! They're spreading their stupidity! At least they were contained before- now they're on the loose everywhere!
-Harlan Ellison

There are more computers running Windows than VMS. There are also more cockroaches than humans.
-Kevin G. Barkes

There are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data and those who will lose data.
-Unattributed

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you play with them.
-Richard P. Feynman

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology- the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-Robert Pirsig

There is no data to support that computers make business more productive... most companies have merely found faster and cheaper ways to do dumb things.
-Gary Loveman

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
-Neil Postman

This computer makes me all frowny with pure nougat-filled hatred!
-Jhonen Vasquez

Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
-Bruce Sterling

We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-Isaac Asimov

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-Douglas Adams

We build our computer [systems] the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
-Ellen Ullman

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-Lee Gomes

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
-Unattributed

Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?
-Clifford Stoll

Without software, a computer is just a lump of plastic- whereas with software, it's a lump of plastic that can permanently destroy critical data.
-Dave Barry

Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn't help you. I'll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
-P.J. O'Rourke

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
-(If Error Messages Were Haiku, www.pcpoetry.com)

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NFPE- NON-FATAL PROCESSING ERROR:

     ITC - IGNORING THE CONTRACTOR
 
Remember that potential race condition I warned you about in the coding implementation meetings? You know, the one you condescendingly dismissed in front of your in-house staff of snickering, cognitively challenged ex-baristas? The condition that could never happen 'in the real world' and therefore could be ignored?
 
Guess what, Skippy? Some other process on the system- perhaps one from that odd location called 'reality'- just changed the offset into the next available customer acccount number table.
 
Fortunately for you, I ignored your explicit refusal to authorize the time necessary to write the code to lock and release the table offset. I did it on my own time out of a sense of professional pride and responsibility. If I hadn't, this application- and, through the resulting series of cascading failures, your entire production system- would have reduced this server to a puddle of molten silicon.

The arcane segmentation fault it would have thrown would have corrupted the entire account number sequencing mechanism. Your crack team of outsourced, clueless code monkeys would have taken weeks to identify the cause, let alone correct it. And who are we kidding? You would have been on the phone to me in under an hour, pleading- no, demanding- that I supply a patch, immediately and at no charge, because it's in a part of the code that I wrote and, therefore, is my fault, despite the fact it behaved exactly in the inane manner you decreed.
 
I would have then directed you here: https://tinyurl.com/nak5n7c
 
It's a capture of that portion of the aforementioned video conference meeting where I warned you about this problem and spent ten minutes describing situations in which the condition could occur- and your response, accompanied by the smirks and giggles of your obsequious minions.
 
This message will appear in the production run log file only this one time and will probably not be seen by anyone, since you only check log files when something crashes and burns. You never check for non-fatal processing errors that should be corrected but aren't because that would be contrary to your policy of ignoring the smoke emanating from your hat until your hair ignites.
 
Anyway, in the unlikely event someone does read this, you should also check the report date function two modules down. As written, the end of month summary publication will at some point display a cover date of February 30. I pointed this out in our last meeting and would have corrected it, but it required access to another function in another module which I couldn't access. You said you'd have Bjorn fix it. Let me tell you about Bjorn. His real name is Walter. He changed it to Bjorn because he thought it would improve his chances of being hired. Walter is only vaguely aware of his surroundings and, if you look right now, is wearing mis-matched socks.
 
You're welcome.
 
And I'm still waiting for that last check.

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Categories: Computers, Quotes on a topic, Technology

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A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation.
-Howard Scott

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the Course."
-Lee Iacocca

CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about.
-Bernie Sanders

Corporate corruption gives al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other Muslim radicals second thoughts about messing with the United States. If we'll screw our own grandmothers in the stock market, God knows what we'll do to them.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-Ambrose Bierce

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys- legally enacted game-playing- agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.
-Buckminster Fuller

Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
-Sir Edward Coke

Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street.
-Cornel West

I have a problem with the concept of a virtual corporation, because it might lead to virtual profits. I prefer the concrete corporation leading to concrete profits.
-Scott McNealy

I know the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, but what I didn't realize is that those people are assholes.
-Jon Stewart

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.
-Katie Thomas

If figures of speech based on sport and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.
-Jay McInerny

In the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting practices.
-George W. Bush

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
-Gloria Steinem

Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.
-Scott Adams

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
-Dave Barry

Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Nothing significant ever happened in corporate America before 11 am.
-Bran Ferren

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity- much less dissent.
-Gore Vidal

The difference between corporations and governments is governments have a monopoly on force. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet or your wallet than it is to change a government with your vote.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The human being who would not harm you on an individual, face-to-face basis, who is charitable, civic-minded, loving and devout, will wound or kill you from behind the corporate veil.
-Morton Mintz

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
-Noam Chomsky

This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
-Rutherford B. Hayes

When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

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A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
-Gore Vidal

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

A fool and his money are soon elected.
-Kinky Friedman

A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.
-Dan Quayle

A society is not "free" merely because the freedoms the people are doing away with are those they voted at the last election to do without.
-William F. Buckley, Jr.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
-O. Henry

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
-John Quincy Adams

America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy- and won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-Bill Vaughan

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.
-James Reston

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
-George Eliot

Any sufficiently advanced coup is indistinguishable from an election.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.
-Elmer Davis

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans... unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
-Karl Rove

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
-Gore Vidal

Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
-Bernard Levin

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
-George J. Nathan

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
-George F. Will

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
-Robert Byrne

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?
-Robert Orben

Domestic policy can only lose elections. Foreign policy can kill us.
-John F. Kennedy

Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even.
-James Carville

Don't vote. It only encourages them.
-Unattributed

During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
-Henry Adams

Elected office holds more perks than Elvis' nightstand.
-Dennis Miller

Elected officials should be limited to two terms: one in office and one in prison.
-Kinky Friedman

Election year is that period when politicians get free speech mixed up with cheap talk.
-J.B. Kidd

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
-Franklin P. Adams

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
-H.L. Mencken

Finally, it occurs to me that the biggest problem with our elections is that however you vote, you wind up electing a politician.
-Burt Prelutsky

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.
-Dave Barry

Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market means they are on sale to the highest bidder.
-Arundhati Roy

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-Frank Dane

Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.
-Harry S. Truman

Given a choice between two bald political candidates, the American people will vote for the less bald of the two.
-Vic Gold

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
-H.L. Mencken

I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
-P.D. James

I didn't vote for change, but that's all I have left.
-Unattributed

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

I like to remind people the choice the American electorate had in 1796 for candidates for President. You could choose between the chairman of the American Society of Arts and Letters and the founding president of the American Academy of Sciences. There's been a bit of a decline in the standards of candidacy since then.
-Christopher Hitchens

I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.
-Claire Sargent

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.
-Maureen Reagan

I'll be glad to either reply to or dodge your questions, whichever I think will help our election most.
-George Herbert Walker Bush

If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained- then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
-Walter Lippmann

If elected, I will win.
-Pat Paulsen

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
-Orson Scott Card

If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates. (book title)
-Jim Hightower

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
-Emma Goldman

If you don't vote, then you may be leaving the decisions up to someone dumber than you.
-Jesse Ventura

If you make less than $50,000 a year and vote Republican, you are a moron.
-Rack Jite

If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.
-Woodrow Wilson

If you voted for change, you better start counting it.
-Unattributed

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons.
-Alice Cooper

In a democracy, the votes of the vicious and stupid count. On the other hand, in any other system, they might be running the show. (from The Boston Globe)
-Unattributed

In any relatively close election you can generally credit almost any subgroup as providing the marginal votes.
-Duncan Black

In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
-Mogens Jallberg

In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.
-Dick Gregory

In nature, stupidity gets you killed. In the workplace, it gets you fired. In politics, it gets you re-elected.
-Bill VanRemmen

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
-Charles de Gaulle

In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes... it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.
-Walter Lippmann

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
-Unattributed

It makes no difference who you vote for- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
-Gore Vidal

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
-Tom Stoppard

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.
-Larry Flynt

Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.
-Booker T. Washington

Never pass up an opportunity to appear on C-Span. C-Span viewers vote.
-Lamar Alexander

Never vote for the best candidate. Vote for the one who will do the least harm.
-Frank Dane

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
-Lily Tomlin

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
-Walter Lippmann

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
-Mark B. Cohen

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

Our elections are free, it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-Bill Stern

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
-Otto von Bismarck

People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything but against something.
-H.H. Munro (Saki)

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
-Buckminster Fuller

Some politician some years ago said that bad officials are elected by good voters who do not vote.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Son, if you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against 'em, you don't deserve to be here.
-Sam Rayburn

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchill

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.
-James Freeman Clarke

The difference between a real horse race an election is that in a horse race the whole horse wins.
-Unattributed

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
-Walter Lippmann

The first thing I'll do if elected is demand a recount.
-Kinky Friedman

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
-Paul Krugman

The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
-Art Spander

The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.
-Aldous Huxley

The next time they give you all that civic bullshit about voting, keep in mind that Hitler was elected in a full, free democratic election.
-George Carlin

The only way to win an election by a greater margin than Saddam Hussein in Iraq is to be a Democratic candidate in Chicago.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
-Henry Cote

The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work; then they get elected and prove it.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
-Thomas Paine

The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.
-Woodrow Wilson

The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.
-Dick Gregory

There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct.
-John Gastil

There are worse things than losing an election; the worst thing is to lose one's convictions and not tell the people the truth.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong- deadly wrong- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.
-Bill Gates

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't "stand for election", they "run for office."
-Jessica Mitford

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
-G.K. Chesterton

Trickery is what humans are all about. They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.
-Terry Pratchett

Truth is not determined by majority vote.
-Doug Gwyn

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-and both commonly succeed, and are right.
-H.L. Mencken

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
-Noam Chomsky

Usually an elected official who has compromised to get nominated, compromised to get elected, and compromised repeatedly to stay in office.
-Dick Gregory

Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
-Bernard Baruch

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
-Ambrose Bierce

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
-George F. Will

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
-Russell Baker

Voters quickly forget what a man says.
-Richard M. Nixon

We already know the winners of the next election. They'll be old white men who don't care about you or your problems.
-Craig Kilborn

We elect Democrats to the Congress to give us stuff and we elect Republicans to the White House so we don't have to pay for it.
-Charlie McDowell

We live in a country where voting rights get gutted but Sharknado gets a sequel.
-John Fugelsang

We live under a republican form of government. We need forever to remember that representative government does represent. A careless, indifferent representative is the result of a careless, indifferent electorate. The people who start to elect a man to get what he can for his district will probably find they have elected a man who will get what he can for himself.
-Calvin Coolidge

We need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.
-Karl Rove

We'd all like to vote for the best man, but he's never a candidate.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

We're not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth- not most days, but every day.
-Ann Richards

What's real in politics is what the voters decide is real.
-Ben J. Wattenberg

When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson-American community vote.
-James Lileks

Why take a chance on a candidate who might lose? You can always buy them after the election.
-Santo Trafficante, Jr.

Years ago, fairy tales all began with "Once upon a time..." Now we know they all begin with "If I am elected."
-Carolyn Warner

Yet in all our rejoicing let us neither express, nor cherish, any harsh feeling towards any citizen who, by his vote, has differed with us. Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.
-Abraham Lincoln

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
-Guy de Maupassant

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
-Stephen Vizinczey

You will never escape the will of the mob. About the best anyone has ever figured out to do is herd them into voting booths.
-Barry Shein

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Categories: Politics, Quotes on a topic

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A famous Frenchman once said, War has become far too important to entrust to the generals. Today, business, I think, should be saying: Politics have become far too important to entrust to the politicians.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

A hungry child knows no politics.
-Ronald Reagan

A lot has been said about politics; some of it complimentary, but most of it accurate.
-Eric Idle

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
-Theodore Roosevelt

A week is a long time in politics.
-Harold Wilson

All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
-George Orwell

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
-James Reston

All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later.
-Ernest Hemingway

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are "up to a point."
-George F. Will

Although He is regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.
-George Mitchell

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it.
-Upton Sinclair

Americans have a tendency to think the problem with politics lies with their candidates and not themselves. The truth is Americans deserve the blame for the state of our politics and the state of our media.
-Jonah Goldberg

An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

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.
-Eugene McCarthy

Engineering is the implementation of science; politics is the implementation of faith.
-Marc Stiegler

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.
-Charles Peguy

Everything is politics.
-Thomas Mann

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
-Richard M. Nixon

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.
-Saul Bellow

I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team.
-Art Buchwald

I don't know a lot about politics, but I can recognize a good party man when I see one.
-Mae West

I don't take art as seriously as politics.
-Orson Welles

I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
-Harold Macmillan

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
-John Adams

I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably, or even usually, a dirty business.
-Richard M. Nixon

I seldom think of politics more than 18 hours a day.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

I wasn't involved in politics at all- until about the age of four.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

I'm afraid the Constitution doesn't say anything about the separation of church and politics.
-Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr.

I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.
-Mort Sahl

I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
-Ann Richards

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
-Bill Moyers

Ideas matter in American politics, but results matter more.
-Dan Balz

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of [chasing women] and drinking, you'd have no government.
-Barry M. Goldwater

If you doubt that it is stinky personality that is the driving force behind conservative politics, look back to your pre-political youth. A dollar to a doughnut everyone of those childhood friends and acquaintances who was an asshole then is a conservative today.
-Rack Jite

If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics.
-Will Rogers

In America the absence of honest passion is a distinguishing feature of both professional wrestling and politics.
-Murray Kempton

In nature, stupidity gets you killed. In the workplace, it gets you fired. In politics, it gets you re-elected.
-Bill VanRemmen

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
-Charles de Gaulle

In politics nothing is immutable. Events carry within them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them and direct them.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

In politics the middle way is none at all.
-John Adams

In politics you can't be true to all of your friends all of the time.
-Perry S. Heath

In politics you have no friends, only allies.
-John F. Kennedy

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.
-R.A. Butler

In politics, a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendship.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.
-San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr.

In politics, an absurdity is not an impediment.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
-Margaret Thatcher

In politics, nothing is contemptible.
-Benjamin Disraeli

In politics, nothing is permanent and, therefore, nothing is too late.
-Bill Clinton

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Instant analysis is the occupational disease. There are no smokestacks, there's no black lung. Politics is the only industry.
-Kirk O'Donnell

It is known, however, that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
-C. Northcote Parkinson

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact.
-David Hume

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
-Pericles

Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried egg on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I've had to deal with in politics.
-Ann Richards

Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
-Gore Vidal

Loyalty in politics was simply devotion to the side which a man conceives to be his side, and which he cannot leave without danger to himself.
-Anthony Trollope

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
-Henry Adams

My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.
-Christopher Hitchens

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
-Jacob Bronowski

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.
-Russell Baker

Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
-Anton Chekhov

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato

People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff?
-Tina Fey

Politics and the shape of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't concern themselves with politics.
-Albert Camus

Politics are a lousy way for a free man to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
-Winston Churchill

Politics are not the task of a Christian.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
-Vera Brittain

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
-W.H. Auden

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
-Paul Krugman

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
-Will Rogers

Politics have no relation to morals.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.
-Albert Einstein

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Politics is about compromises... really stupid compromises.
-Bill Maher

Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.
-Sean Wilentz

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.
-George McGovern

Politics is applesauce.
-Will Rogers

Politics is applied biology.
-Ernst Haeckel

Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did.
-Jimmy Durante

Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for.
-Jerry Rubin

Politics is just like show business, you have a hell of an opening, coast for a while and then have a hell of a close.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.
-Unattributed

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.
-Edouard Herriot

Politics is like the bumper cars at the amusement park. It's a delusion to think that by refusing to move, you can protect yourself from being hit.
-Unattributed (From The Weekly Standard)

Politics is like the stock market: it's a bad business for people who can't afford to lose.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-Dalton Camp

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is show business for ugly people.
-Sonny Bono

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant.
-Henri Queuille

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
-Paul Valery

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
-Frank Zappa

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Politics is the only field of human endeavor where the more experience you have, the worse you get.
-Kinky Friedman

Politics is the pursuit of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
-George J. Nathan

Politics is the science of urgencies.
-Theodore Parker

Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why.
-Sidney Hillman

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
-Lester B. Pearson

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.
-Jim Hightower

Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
-George F. Will

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-Henry Adams

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
-Richard Armour

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics: the art of keeping as many balls as possible up in the air at one time- while protecting your own.
-Sam Attlesey

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
-Jimmy Breslin

Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.
-Henry Adams

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken sh*t can turn to chicken salad.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians.
-Fletcher Knebel

The central conservative truth is that is it culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The difference between politics and baseball is that in baseball, when you get caught stealing, you're out.
-Ron Dentinger

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.
-Theodore H. White

The great difficulty with politics is, that there are no established principles.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.
-Ben Bradlee

The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.
-Lord Hailsham

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
-Will Rogers

The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics.
-Jonathan Alter

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.
-Walter Lippmann

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-H.L. Mencken

The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly," meaning "many," and the word "ticks," meaning "blood sucking parasites."
-Larry Hardiman

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.
-John Jay Chapman

There are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party, and our country.
-John McCain

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.
-Alan Clark

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct.
-John Gastil

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honor.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint, and sometimes sounds distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.
-Woodrow Wilson

This is quite a game, politics. There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
-William Clay

Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.
-Bertolt Brecht

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.
-William Penn

To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.
-Hubert H. Humphrey

Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift, but it is worth little in politics.
-Woodrow Wilson

Too often in politics, there are fallacious either/or arguments put up as a justification or an excuse for an action or view which is skewed in such a way as too suggest that there is only one acceptable choice.
-Peter Garrett

Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics.
-George McGovern

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.
-Bill Bradley

War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.
-Karl von Clausewitz

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.
-Martin L. Gross

What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
-William Saroyan

What's real in politics is what the voters decide is real.
-Ben J. Wattenberg

When a politician starts preaching, I tend to react the same way as when a preacher starts talking politics. I become very, very wary.
-Madeleine Albright

When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
-P.J. O'Rourke

When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago, so I can still be active in politics.
-Charlie Rangel

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.
-Jim Hightower

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.
-Frank Herbert

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.
-Frank Herbert

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.
-Ken Livingstone

Without alienation, there can be no politics.
-Arthur Miller

You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.
-Molly Ivins

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902) was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

How long will the heathens rage?

I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.

It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.

Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning...We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.

The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.

The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings.

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.

To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.

Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.

We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of 'Thus sayeth the Lord.'

Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.

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A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
-Charles Manson

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
-Virginia Woolf

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
-William Saroyan

America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.
-Charles Pierce

Being crazy isn't enough.
-Dr. Seuss

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.
-Allen Ginsberg

Don't call me irrational. It makes me crazy when you do that. (From the TV series "Frasier")
-Unattributed

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
-William Dement

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
-Edith Sitwell

Everyone's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Excessive productivity can bring the most gifted man almost to madness.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
-John Dryden

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
-Raymond Chandler

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
-Steve Landesberg

I am not insane, you just have no context.
-Velut Luna

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.
--Oscar Levant

I'll take crazy over stupid any day.
-Joss Whedon

If you do something and people think you're stupid, just go for crazy. You get more respect that way because nobody likes stupid people.
-Louis C.K.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers, but creative artists very seldom.
-G.K. Chesterton

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
-Oscar Wilde

In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you've been catching the news lately you'll have noticed it's being done more than ever.
-John Brunner

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
-Johnny Carson

In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
--Thomas Szasz

Industrial man- a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
--Aldous Huxley

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
-Nora Ephron

Insanity in the individual is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a raise.
-Robert Brault

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
-Ray Bradbury

It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.
--Joseph Conrad

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
-Philip K. Dick

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
-Mel Brooks

Madness may be a sane response to an insane world, and insanity breeds special perceptions.
-R.D. Laing

Madness takes it toll. Please have exact change.
-Unattributed

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
-Anna Quindlen

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.
-Austin O'Malley

Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
--Karl Menninger

Mothers are all slightly insane.
-J.D. Salinger

My grandmother was insane. She had pierced hearing aids.
-Steven Wright

Never tell a crazy person he's crazy.
-Tina Fey

Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.
--Yogi Berra

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
-Heinrich Heine

Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.
-Alexander Pope

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.
--Karl Kraus

Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.
-Scott Adams

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
-John Russel

So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)- so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self- mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.
--Thomas Szasz

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.
--Richard Carlson

The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.
-Unattributed

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you.
-Mark Edwards

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.
-Thomas Szasz

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
--Rita Mae Brown

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-Terry Pratchett

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
-Oscar Levant

There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
--Dave Barry

There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of everything.
-Joseph Hell

This is a mournful discovery.
1) Those who agree with you are insane
2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.
-Philip K. Dick

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.
-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
-Henrik Tikkanen

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find distorted minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
-Hermann Hesse

When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
-Philip K. Dick

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.
-Robert Pirsig

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
-Dave Barry

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Each fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, football fans cheer for their favorite irrational number: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!"
-Bruce Watson

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.
-David Letterman

Ah, the gap between expectation and achievement is filled with the screams of good men, still falling.
-Reginald Hill

All through history it's the nations that have given most to generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall.
-Harry S. Truman

Attempted assassinations are the accidents of kings, just as falling chimneys are the accidents of masons. If we must weep, let us weep for the masons.
-Benito Mussolini

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
-Colin Powell

Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.
-Dan McKinnon

Character is made by what you stand for; reputation, by what you fall for.
-Robert Quillen

I hate when my foot falls asleep during the day because it means it's going to be up all night.
-Steven Wright

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
-Ernest Hemingway

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is Bambi squashed beneath it any less dead?
-Mason Capwell

If I must fall, may it be from a high place.
-Paulo Coelho

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
-General Marquisde Lafayette

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a horizontal fall.
-Jean Cocteau

Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.
-Theodore Parker

Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
-Evan Esar

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Old age is not an accomplishment; it is just something that happens to you despite yourself, like falling downstairs.
-Robert A. Heinlein

On the fall of an oak every man gathers wood.
-Menander

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
-Robert Firth

Only when a tree has fallen can you take a measure of it. It is the same with a man.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People who wrestle with their consciences usually go for two falls out of three.
-Unattributed

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.
-Edouard Herriot

Romance without finance is a nuisance. Few men value free merchandise. Let the chippies fall where they may.
-Sally Stanford

Running a ball club is like raising kids who fall out of trees.
-Tom Trebelhorn

The bigger they come, the harder they fall on you.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

The hardest tumble one can take is to fall over his own bluff.
-Unattributed

The highlight of my baseball career came in Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium when I saw a fan fall out of the upper deck. When he got up and walked away, the crowd booed.
-Bob Uecker

The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
-Paulo Coelho

The shah always falls in the end, Saddam always turns on you, and the Saudis always betray you. If we support evil, the long-term price is almost always too high.
-Ralph Peters, Lt. Col. (Ret)

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.
(Sign in NASA Onboard Shuttle Software Group)
-Unattributed

There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
-Alexander Hamilton

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.
-Confucius

We see men fall from high estate on account of the very faults through which they attained it.
-Jean de la Bruyere

Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence; so why bother shaving?
-Woody Allen

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.
-Paulo Coelho

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
-Quentin Crisp

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
-James Thurber

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More for Constitution Day...

A citizen's constitutional rights can hardly be infringed simply because a majority of the people choose that it be.
-Earl Warren

A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
-John Adams

A country that can put men on the moon can put women in the Constitution.
-Margaret Heckler

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
-Felix Frankfurter

At the constitutional level where we work, ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.
-Charles Evans Hughes

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
-Gore Vidal

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
-Edward Gibbon

Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well. It means that everybody should have a job, if he's willing to work, and an education, and the right to bring up his children without fear of the future. And it means that the old shall be provided for, without shame to themselves or to their families. It means do unto others as you would have others do unto you. It also means the prayers of the pilgrim fathers in the wilderness, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the dreams of an immigrant mother for her children. And that's what I believe in.
-Dalton Trumbo

Each public officer who takes an oath to support the constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.
-Andrew Jackson

Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.
-Thomas Jefferson

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
-Thurgood Marshall

I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation.
-Carl Sagan

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
-Benjamin Disraeli

I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.
-Bill Maher

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
-Thomas Jefferson

I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.
-Molly Ivins

I'm afraid the Constitution doesn't say anything about the separation of church and politics.
-Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr.

I've always been a big supporter of the constitutional right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition government for redress of grievances. It's just that I never envisioned it taking the form of thousands of people screaming, "You asshole, you asshole," at me.
-Lowell Weicker

If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
-William J. Brennan, Jr.

If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the American flag and talk about the Constitution.
-Matthew Stanley Quay

It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
-Molly Ivins

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us.
-Alex Kozinski

It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.
-Antonin Scalia

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
-Learned Hand

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.
-Samuel Adams

Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.
-Warren Burger

On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
-Thomas Jefferson

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes.
-Benjamin Franklin

Our Constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U.S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
-Will Rogers

Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.
-Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Since when is public safety the root password to the Constitution?
-C.D. Tavares

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.
-Thomas Jefferson

Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.
-James Madison

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
-George Washington

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.
-Clarence Darrow

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.
-William J. Brennan, Jr.

The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. (speech at the 1787 Constitutional Convention)
-Elbridge Gerry

The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
-William J. Brennan, Jr.

The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
-Henry Kissinger

The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
-Abraham Lincoln

The rank and file have let their servants become their masters and dictators... Provision should be made in all union constitutions for the recall of leaders. Big salaries should not be paid. Career hunters should be driven out, as well as leaders who use labor for political ends. These types are menaces to the advancement of labor.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
-Erwin N. Griswold

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong- deadly wrong- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
-Abraham Lincoln

Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.
-William O. Douglas

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
-William J. Brennan, Jr.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.
-Gore Vidal

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society.
-Walter Lippmann

Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking, which leads by a slippery slope toward constitutional democracy.
-Robert Anton Wilson

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I'm visiting two doctors this afternoon. I've seen one for 27 years, and been a patient of the other for 42 years. The good news is my mood should improve, and the rash should clear up. Any day now.

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A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
-George Bernard Shaw

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
-Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz

A virus is a Latin word translated by doctors to mean "Your guess is as good as mine."
-Unattributed

All the possibilities
It had to reject are
What give life and warmth to
An actual character;
The roots of wit and charm tap
Secret springs of sorrow,
Every brilliant doctor
Hides a murderer.
-W.H. Auden

As she lay there dozing next to me, one voice inside my head kept saying, "Relax... you are not the first doctor to sleep with one of his patients,' but another kept reminding me, "Howard, you are a veterinarian."
-Dick Wilson

Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.
-Benjamin Franklin

Crime isn't a disease, it's a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor.
-Raymond Chandler

Doctors bury mistakes. Lawyers hang them. But journalists put theirs on the front page.
-Unattributed

Doctors cut, burn and torture the sick, and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services.
-Heraclitus

Doctors will tell you don't smoke, don't drink, eat certain foods... From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself, I'll get very sick and die.
-Rodney Dangerfield

God heals, the doctor takes the fee.
-Benjamin Franklin

He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir.
-Benjamin Franklin

Heaven defend me from a busy doctor. (Welsh Proverb)
-Unattributed

I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself.
-Rodney Dangerfield

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
-Rita Rudner

If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.
-G.K. Chesterton

If the doctor told me I had only six months to live, I'd type faster.
-Isaac Asimov

If there were enough doctors, we would all be sick.
-Wendell Johnson

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
-Lord Salisbury

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
-Marcel Proust

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

My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.
-W.C. Fields

Some doctors make the same mistakes for twenty years and call it clinical experience.
-Dr. Noah Fabricant

The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing.
-Yogi Berra

When I was born, the doctor turned me over and said, "Look! Twins!"
-Rodney Dangerfield

You should have scheduled an appointment, gone through your physician's assistant, insisted on seeing your primary care doctor, gotten a referral, and come to me sooner! (doctor to patient in a cartoon caption)
-Unattributed

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Extremely busy, lots of deadlines...

Today is Dorothy Parker's birthday: visit her page here.

It's also Ray Bradbury's birthday; click here for his quote collection.

Did I mention pressure? In various forms... see you tomorrow.

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Definition of expert: x as in unknown, spurt as in drip under pressure. (From Computerworld)
-Unattributed

Hermits have no peer pressure.
-Steven Wright

I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.
-E.B. White

I'm a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by low barometric pressure and not gay marriage. (dialogue from "The Newsroom")
-Aaron Sorkin

I'm working on a plan to take all the salt out of all the oceans. The fish are getting high blood pressure.
-Steven Wright

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
-Peter Ustinov

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be a description without meaning- as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
-Albert Einstein

Lobbyists are people who go to Washington to mix business with pressure.
-Lane Olinghouse

Pressure is a five dollar bet with three dollars in your pocket.
-Lee Travino

The polygraph looks for abrupt increases in heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. The polygraph is, therefore, a highly reliable detector of orgasms. But does it detect lies? Only if you're lying about having an orgasm.
-Robert Park

The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment- social, political, or ethical- can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.
-John Steinbeck

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.
-Alfred Adler

There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
-Terry Pratchett

Things get worse under pressure. (Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics)
-Unattributed

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
-Noam Chomsky

Truth has a way of shifting under pressure.
-Curtis Bock

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On August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon announced he would resign the next day.

The night before, Nixon had met in the Oval Office with Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott, and Congressman John Jacob Rhodes. They told Nixon that he not only faced certain impeachment in the House of Representatives over the Watergate scandal, but that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him and remove him from office.

It was the first time a U.S. President resigned.

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I thought it was a helluva thriller. JFK`s murder marked the end of a dream, the end of a concept of idealism that I associate with my youth. Race war, Vietnam, Watergate. If JFK had lived, the combat situation in Vietnam would never have occurred.
-Oliver Stone

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.
-Billy Graham

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.
-Bob Woodward

I used to think that the Civil War was our country`s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.
-Andrea Cohen

From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one- absolutely no one- is above the law.
-Leon Jaworski

Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
-Archibald Cox

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
-John le Carre

The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to bypass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
-Gerald R. Ford

This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.
-Dee Dee Myers

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
-Daniel Keys Moran

Watergate was unique because it allowed the public to play its democratic role in expressing its outrage at the presidency.
-Samuel Dash

Well, a lot of people don't want to be quoted. But keep in mind that Bob Woodward did all of his Watergate reporting with anonymous sources, and we know how that turned out.
-Edward Klein

The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate.
-Dexter S. King

I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior. You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.
-Chuck Colson

When you're a lawyer, you expect your client to lie to you, but not when he is the President.
-Dick Houser

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.
-Golda Meir

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
-Arthur M. Schlesinger

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I`m innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.
-Richard M. Nixon

There's a cancer on the presidency.
-John Dean

I can take it... The tougher it gets, the cooler I get...
-Richard M. Nixon

I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same thing.
-Richard M. Nixon

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
-Richard M. Nixon

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.
-Richard M. Nixon

Watergate does not bother me,
Does your conscience bother you?
-Lynyrd Skynyrd

The slow-rising central horror of Watergate is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
-Yogi Berra

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A clear conscience needs no public information officer. (from The New York Times)
-Unattributed

A conscience which has been bought once will be bought twice.
-Norbert Weiner

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
-Doug Larson

A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.
-Jane Austen

A person may sometimes have a clear conscience simply because his head is empty.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A reformer is one who insists on his conscience being your guide.
-Millard Miller

A satellite has no conscience.
-Edward R. Murrow

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
-H.L. Mencken

Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
-Hermann Hesse

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
-Albert Camus

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
-George Bernard Shaw

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
-Oscar Wilde

Conscience does make cowards of us all.
-William Shakespeare

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
-H.L. Mencken

Conscience is a small inner voice that doesn't speak your language.
-Unattributed

Conscience is better served by a myth.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.
-H.L. Mencken

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-Sigmund Freud

Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinion of others.
-Sir Henry Taylor

Conscience places a bridle upon the tongue.
-Publilius Syrus

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
-Paul Valery

Conscious is when you are aware of something, and conscience is when you wish you weren't.
-Unattributed

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Did anyone ever wrestle with his conscience and lose?
-Mort Sahl

Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
-John Milton

I am a conscientious man. When I throw rocks at seabirds, I leave no tern unstoned.
-Ogden Nash

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.
-Lillian Hellman

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.
-Theodore Parker

I don't think you can make a lawyer honest by an act of legislature. You've got to work on his conscience. And his lack of conscience is what makes him a lawyer.
-Will Rogers

I have faith in the universe, for it is rational. Law underlies each happening. And I have faith in my purpose here on earth. I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time- here and now.
-Albert Einstein

I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.
-Woodrow Wilson

In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.
-Felix Frankfurter

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.
-George Washington

Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
-Albert Einstein

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.
-Theodore Parker

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

Now that women have been more or less freed by the three C's- cars, can-openers, and contraceptives- it seems too bad that the fourth one, conscience, so often has to butt in.
-Peg Bracken

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil," it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
-Sydney J. Harris

Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain. It is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
-C.S. Lewis

People who wrestle with their consciences usually go for two falls out of three.
-Unattributed

Reason deceives use often; conscience never.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
-Henry Wheeler Shaw

Temptation is the voice of the suppressed evil; conscience is the voice of the repressed good.
-J.A. Hadfield

The Anglo-Saxon conscience doesn't keep you from doing anything. It just keeps you from enjoying it.
-Salvador de Madaringa

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.
-E.B. White

The conscience is a thousand witnesses.
-Richard Taverner

The good conscience of the wicked rest on all the villainies they refrain form committing.
-Stephen Vizinczey

The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man.
-James Madison

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
-Omar Bradley

There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience.
-Stokely Carmichael

There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.
-St. Ambrose

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.
-Ogden Nash

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
-Joseph Conrad

To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation"- this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
-Aldous Huxley

Tyrants have no consciences, and reformers no feeeling; and the world suffers both by the plague and by the cure.
-Horace Walpole

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-Adam Smith

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
-John F. Kennedy

We lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
-Aldous Huxley

What we call conscience, in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the constable.
-Christian Bovee

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.
-Jack Kevorkian

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[Lecturing to college students] was like being in a house with a whole set of very bright baboons. You expected them to burst into human speech at any minute, but they never did.
-Katherine Anne Porter

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A speech is made great, not from the words used, but from the ideas conveyed. If the ideas, principles and values and substance of the speech are great, then it's going to be a great speech, even if the words are pedestrian. The words can be soaring, beautiful and eloquent but if the ideas are flat, empty or mean, it's not a great speech.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.
-Auberon Waugh

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.
-Garry Trudeau

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, except to encourage attendance in Christian churches; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, except to require prayer in schools; or abridging the freedom of speech, except for those questioning the Bush administration; or of the press, except that not owned by Rupert Murdoch; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, except those protesting pre-emptive wars; and to petition the government for a redress of grievance, except those we don't like.
-Gary Hart

During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
-Henry Adams

Election year is that period when politicians get free speech mixed up with cheap talk.
-J.B. Kidd

Freedom of speech in no way guarantees freedom from hearing.
-Pat Paulsen

I believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe in, the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in, and the personal freedom that America used to believe in.
-Doug Mataconis

I want to be American. America is the coolest place on the face of the Earth. You've got freedom of speech. You've got McDonalds.
-Ozzy Osbourne

If figures of speech based on sport and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.
-Jay McInerny

If you want free speech, walk in a closet and talk to yourself.
-Howard Stern

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
-George Orwell

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

It is not enough to "have" free speech. People must learn to speak freely.
-Christopher Hitchens

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
-Will Rogers

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt: speech was given to conceal thought.
-William Osler

Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?
-Roger Ebert

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
-Søren Kierkegaard

Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say "Heil Hitler."
-Isaac Asimov

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
-Susan Sontag

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact- it is silence which isolates.
-Thomas Mann

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
-John Andrew Holmes

Speech is not free if it costs people their jobs.
-Henry A. Wallace

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.
-Anthony Trollope

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
-Clifton Fadiman

The best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.
-Ruth Gordon

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
-Anthony Kennedy

The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind.
-Mike Godwin

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting "fire" in a theater and causing a panic.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
-Justice Robert Jackson

The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
-Michael Shermer

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
-George Bernard Shaw

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
-George Orwell

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them, either.
-Gore Vidal

We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make- we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech.
-David Brin

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.
-Hansell B. Duckett

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself-like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.
-Jean Kerr

You have the right to free speech, as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it.
-The Clash

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A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
-Walter Bagehot

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
-Penn Jillette

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really.
-Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Employees want to feel they participated in the formation of the business plan. This scam is called "buy in," and it's essential for reminding the employees that if anything goes wrong, it's their fault.
-Scott Adams

Failure to understand reality is not reality's fault.
-Bill Henneman

I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.
-Robert J. Elkins

I hold that companionship is a matter of mutual weaknesses. We like that man or woman best who has the same faults we have.
-George J. Nathan

I like a friend better for having faults that one can talk about.
-William Hazlitt

I might have my faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.
-Jimmy Hoffa

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, faultfinding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice- they all make fine fuel.
-Edna Ferber

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
-Jack Kerouac

If you want people to notice your faults, start giving advice.
-Kelly Stephens

If youth is a fault, it is one which is soon corrected.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
-James Thurber

It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.
-Anthony Trollope

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated but for our qualities.
-Bernard Berenson

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
-Jack Kerouac

My perception was/is that while the rest of the computer world was striving for Fault Tolerant Software, Microsoft was working on Fault Tolerant Users.
-John Robinson

None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
-Oscar Wilde

People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.
-Sydney J. Harris

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
-Laurence J. Peter

Some faults are so closely allied to qualities that it is difficult to weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.
-Oliver Goldsmith

Some people find fault like there's a reward for it.
-Zig Ziglar

The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.
-Benjamin Franklin

The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-Roger Levian

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
-Bruce Sterling

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.
-Henry Kissinger

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that's laughable is vanity.
-Henri Bergson

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.
-John F. Kennedy

To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.
-Alexander Pope

Tolerance comes with age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We are dismayed when we find that even disaster cannot cure us of our faults.
-Marquis de Vauvenargues

We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
-George Eliot

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
-Gene Roddenberry

We see men fall from high estate on account of the very faults through which they attained it.
-Jean de la Bruyere

We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
-Dorothy Thompson

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.
-Hermann Hesse

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.
-Clarence Darrow

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Don't save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.
-Leo Durocher

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.
-Billie Holiday

For after all, the best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If I were running the world, I would have it rain only between 2 and 5 a.m. Anyone who was out then ought to get wet.
-William Lyon Phelps

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.
-Michael McClary

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
-John Updike

Save a boyfriend for a rainy day-and another, in case it doesn't rain.
-Mae West

Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet.
-Roger Miller

Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again.
-Jimmy Piersall

The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.
-Theodore H. White

The drowning man is not troubled by rain.
-Unattributed

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
-W. Somerset Maugham

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
-Dolly Parton

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
-Frederick Douglass

Trouble will rain on those who are already wet.
-Unattributed

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.
-George Carlin

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A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
-Benjamin Disraeli

A hypocrite is a person who- but who isn't?
-Don Marquis

As religion is imitated and mocked by hypocrisy, so public duty is parodied by patriotism.
-J. E. Thorold Rogers

Don't stay away from church because there are so many hypocrites. There's always room for one more.
-A.R. Adams

Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasions to change.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.
-William Penn

Hubris and hypocrisy are a deadly combination.
-Anne-Marie Slaughter

Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all.
-William Bennett

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is the lubricant of society.
-David Hull

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Hypocrite: a guy who writes a book on atheism and prays that it sells.
-Woody Allen

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
-Oscar Wilde

I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment.
-Stephen Colbert

In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
-Henry Miller

Manners are the hypocrisy of nations.
-Honoré de Balzac

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
-Samuel Johnson

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
-Hannah Arendt

Public prayer is no evidence of piety. It is practiced by an abundance of hypocrites. But private prayer is a thing for which the hypocrite has no heart.
-Charles H. Spurgeon

Same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
-Ursula K. LeGuin

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a begging.
-Martin Luther

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.
-Alan Alda

The greatest and truest zeal gives us no security against hypocrisy: The most open impiety is attended with a secret dread and compunction.
-David Hume

The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself.
-Hannah Arendt

The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

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

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
-William Hazlitt

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Action is the antidote to despair.
-Joan Baez

Boredom is the root of all evil- the despairing refusal to be oneself.
-Søren Kierkegaard

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
-Diane de Poitiers

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.
-Graham Greene

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
-Franz Kafka

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
-Aeschylus

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

God does not send us despair in order to kill us, he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.
-Hermann Hesse

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.
-Arthur Miller

I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected contingencies. The optimal way to deal with this is not to give up in despair, but to move ahead using the best intelligence and resources that we have to overcome adversity.
-Paul Kurtz

I can endure my own Despair
But not another's Hope.
-William Walsh

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.
-Joseph Conrad

I do not despair for our country. I never do. I believe, as I always have, the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the American people will prevail.
-Jimmy Carter

If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I would not despair over her. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to remain one for five years, I would give him up.
-Søren Kierkegaard

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
-C.S. Lewis

Life begins on the other side of despair.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
-Peggy Noonan

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
-Edmund Burke

Remember that despair is never the solution. Remember, hatred is never an option. Remember that hope is not a gift given to us, hope is a gift that we give to others.
-Elie Wiesel

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes; that is always a sign of despair in a woman.
-Oscar Wilde

The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.
-Harry Ruby

The initial expression of defiance is precisely despair over one's weakness.
-Søren Kierkegaard

The machinery chugs on unabated, belching out its dehumanizing product. It is distressing. But I refuse to despair. I know, one day, the Supreme Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.
-William J. Brennan, Jr.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
-H.L. Mencken

Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.
-Florence King

To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
-Cornel West

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
-Douglas MacArthur

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America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
-John Quincy Adams

Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market means they are on sale to the highest bidder.
-Arundhati Roy

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.
-Stephen Colbert

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.
-Samuel Eliot Morison

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-Thomas Paine

It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness.
-P.J. O'Rourke

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 their struggle for independence.
-Charles Austin Beard

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
-Joseph Heller

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
-Emma Goldman

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable...in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism-
The right to criticise.
The right to hold unpopular beliefs.
The right to protest.
The right of independent thought.
-Margaret Chase Smith

For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad... but I could never find me a double hammock.
-Frank Sinatra

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If you're on Twitter and are not easily offended, consider following TheTweetofGod...

Anyone who thinks human life is sacred to Me has never read the Bible. That thing makes Tarantino look like Disney.

Life is a struggle not between good and evil, but between those who see it that way and those who don't.

Well I've lost faith in you, too.

From now on I'd like to be called P. Deity.

Paula Deen saying all that matters is "what's in your heart" is cardiologically hilarious.

Wow, I really enjoyed deciding who won that game.

The big difference between me and Kanye is I impregnated a virgin, whereas Kanye... well, did not.

Sometimes Jesus asks himself, "What would some self-righteous hypocrite do?"

You're welcome, Phil.

I could totally beat Superman in a fight.

"Despicable Me 2" was My original title for the New Testament.

I support marijuana. I created it for you. In fact the Garden of Eden was full of it. That was Eve's downfall. She got the munchies.

I find the vast majority of you profoundly unpleasant.

Lying makes Jesus cry. Stealing makes Jesus cry. Jaywalking makes Jesus cry. A real pussy, that kid.

There is a book with stories about incest, genocide, rape and crucifixion in almost every hotel room in the world.

I designed the sun to be 100% solar-powered. #green

My love for you is unconditional, provided you do and think exactly as I say.

Please stay safe, Oklahoma, because evidently I'm angry at you again for absolutely no reason.

The twist ending to M. Night Shyamalan's career is that it turns out it was dead the whole time.

When I work in mysterious ways it's called grace. When you work in mysterious ways it's called grounds for termination.

The first person to call you a jerk is probably just jealous, but the hundredth may be on to something.

Yes!!!
@TheTweetOfGod 723.9K followers
@RichardDawkins 723.6K followers
Believe in THAT, Dick!
It's no "delusion"!
I WIN I WIN I WIN!!!

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I don't mean to be a diva, but some days you wake up and you're Barbara Streisand.
-Courtney Love

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of The New York Times.
-John F. Kennedy

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Some days even wearing my lucky rocketship underwear doesn't help. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
-Raymond Chandler

Some days I wake up grouchy. Most days I let her sleep.
-Unattributed

Some days those bridge abutments at the side of the road look pretty damned attractive.
-Kevin G. Barkes

Some days you need to look reality in the eye, and deny it.
-Garrison Keillor

Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
-Unattributed

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Categories: Quotes on a topic

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