Quotes

[blueeowyn]

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.
-- Norman Douglas

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.
-- G. K. Chesterton

Reality is something you rise above.
-- Liza Minnelli

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.
-- Barbara Streisand

A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.
-- Pablo Picasso

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

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
-- Samuel Butler
Which is no laughing matter

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
-- Otto von Bismarck
And you REALLY want good oversight of them

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
It used to take a computer to really mess things up...

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
-- Philip K. Dick

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

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-- Laurens van der Post

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
-- Pat Conroy

The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
-- Laurence J. Peter

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
-- Cato the Elder

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
-- Will Rogers

CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Ah yes, the 4th estate, the power behind the throne

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.
-- Penn Jillette

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.
-- Bill Nye

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
-- Thomas Hardy

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
-- Nicholas Butler

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-- Richard Feynman

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence Darrow

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-- Frank Dane
No comment

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
-- Aesop

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Exhibit A - election results

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
-- Marston Bates

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And twist other things as well to suit ones expectations/desire

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.
-- Al Franken

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
-- Robertson Davies
And many other times

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
-- Robert Frost

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
-- C. S. Lewis

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
-- John Buchan

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
-- Neil Gaiman

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
-- Anatole Broyard

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

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
-- E. B. White

If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it -- too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul -- the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush
into the unrighteousness that hubris always breeds.
-- Plato

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
-- Andre Maurois

Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness.
-- Cullen Hightower

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
-- Brendan Gill

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
-- James Thurber

Do something for somebody every day for which you do not get paid.
-- Albert Schweitzer

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
-- Joseph Conrad

Girls are always running through my mind. They don't dare walk.
-- Andy Gibb
The designers couldn't make a coaster like my mind, it is way too twisted ... massive paraphrase of a comment on rec.roller-coaster many years ago

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
-- Henri Poincare
But it can be a start

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
-- Thomas H. Huxley

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager."
-- William S. Burroughs

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana

Fools rush in where fools have been before.
-- Unknown

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?
-- George Price

The whole world is in revolt. Soon there will be only five Kings left--the King of England, the King of Spades, The King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, and the King of Diamonds.
-- King Farouk of Egypt (in 1948)

In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
-- Ellen DeGeneres

I am not young enough to know everything.
-- Oscar Wilde

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
-- Steven Wright

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.
-- Shana Alexander

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay
Build it and it will come

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
-- William Gibson

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
-- George Santayana

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.
-- William Faulkner

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.
-- Richard M. Nixon
Really???

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
-- Edward Gibbon

Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd.
-- Allan Goldfein
The sign of true maturity is the willingness to be silly

The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble.
-- Ellen DeGeneres

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
-- Fred Allen