Come on in, we're making up Aphorisms!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You know what I mean. Those pithy one-liners that express some universal truth. I hope what we see here will run the gamut from serious to ridiculously funny. If you care to participate, I suggest you give the aphorism as the subject, and use the body of your post to explain yourself.

I’ll begin with a serious one:

It is the prerogative of the State to determine what endangers it.

By this I refer to the way in which nearly every government, it seems, responds to at some situations by enacting very harsh laws, to the extent that a sizeable minority of citizens consider those laws to be way overboard in relation to the situation that is supposed to be corrected. In the U.S. for instance, we have people being sent away for 20 years for the crime of growing cannabis. Many, perhaps most citizens think that’s way overboard, but the body politic thinks that marijuana represents a sufficient threat to require such drastic measures. Or, put another way, it is the prerogative of the State, yadda yadda yadda. NOTE: I don’t want to start a GD about drug laws. I’m just giving this as an example of the concept.

2

I’ve asserted this one in a number of GD threads. I here replace a period with a semicolon, in order to comply with the OP’s rule that it must be a one-liner :smiley: :
In a free society, citizens are not required to justify themselves or their actions to the state; rather, the state must justify it’s actions to it’s citizens.

3

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is merely the trade-name of the firm.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Okay, so I didn’t make them up. Oscar Wilde did. But there’s no better source for clever aphorisms; the man’s writing is fairly filled to the brim with epigram.

[sub]So I just started The Picture of Dorian Gray, sue me[/sub]

4

I can’t thing of anything meaningful or witty to say at 3:30 in the morning.

That’s a universal truth if I ever saw one.

5

ok it’s not mine, but I think of it sometimes when I’m reading in General Questions and Great Debates.

C.S. Peirce

On a lighter note, I have observed that: Any given thread on the SDMB is likely to have a great name for a band.

6

“A fish with no scales cannot claim to be a whale”

trust me…there’s a deep meaning to that…yeeeaaah

then there’s my sig…how true it is

7

See a pin and pick it up - and all day you’ll have … a pin.

8

oh, and my sig …

9

If you can actually see your daily commuting distance on a 12-inch world globe, you’re commuting too far.

10

**If you know what you’re doing, it’s not an adventure.

Skills are the flowers you get when you water your talent bush.** credit: Spider Robinson, I think…

Spend as much time as you can with the nice people, because it barely begins to make up for the time you have to spend with the jerks.

11

Money not only makes the world go 'round, but it also makes it much, much easier to buy cold beer.

12

It is impossible to compare only one thing.

13

In certainty lies folly–the wise always question.

–Probably someone has said it before…but I can’t be sure. :slight_smile:

There is power in the smallest of things, and weakness in the greatest.

–Just a (hopefully) eloquent statement of the obvious.

A shadow may slip through cracks where its master cannot go.

–Can we say “plausible deniability”, boys and girls?

If you choose to wear a duck on your head, don’t complain when it #!^ down the back of your neck.

–I was tired of serious ones. :smiley: If you make a decision with obvious consequences, don’t complain when the inevitable happens.

14

I’ll add my .sig, “Rigardu, kaj vi ekvidos.”

It’s a line from a song. It means, “Look, and you shall begin to see.” It’s trivially true, like 1=1, yet somehow has vague significance beyond its years.

15

The tragedy of the human condition is that we are aware of our own mortality. The comedy of the human condition is that we are aware of our own nakedness.

Pretty much sums it up for me.

16

One of my favorite ‘clean’ aphorisms that is also a double entendre.

17

One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh - RAH

O

Rub Her Feet.

18

Well OK, then I got another Wildism: Bigamy is having one wife too many, monogamy the same.

Here’s another of my own:

A bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, but a bird cooked and ready to eat is worth two in the hand, at least.

19

What language is that? Romanian?

20

“No one expects the Spainish Inquisition!” Monty Python

“Cuteness is in the eye of the beholder.”

“A nose by any other name still smells.”