“Smiling is an absurd waste of time. I’d rather eat shit than smile, unless it was a shit eating grin”
“People who are constantly happy care too much about what other people think of them. Therefore, if you are chipper you’re a sellout and I don’t like you”
“…fear and pain may accompany death, but it is desire that shepherds it’s certainty.” - Doug Bradley
“Like most Frenchmen, he loved a good pun, and rather liked a bad one.”
Miles Kington, writing of Alphonse Allais.
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every - single - one - of - them - is- right!”
Rudyard Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age”
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardhip, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty. This much we pledge–and more.
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do, for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
President John Firzgerald Kennedy in his Inaugural Address
I’ve been collecting these for awhile - Sorry if there are any repeats from above. Also, they are in no particular order.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
-Oscar Wilde
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
-Wilson Mizner
There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.
-Lester J. Pourciau
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
-Vince Lombardi
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-Oscar Wilde
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
-Henry Ford
There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.
-George Carlin
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
-Samuel Johnson
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
-Dale Carnegie
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
-George Orwell
A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
-Bob Edwards
Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.
-Dave Barry
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
-Henry Kissinger
A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
-Abraham Lincoln
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.
-Isaac Asimov
You can observe a lot just by watching.
-Yogi Berra
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-Mark Twain
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
-Quentin Crisp
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
-Josh Billings
People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.
-Lee Iacocca
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-Michel de Montaigne
No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.
-Yogi Berra
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
-Chinese Proverb
The time to pray is not when we are in a tight spot but just as soon as we get out of it.
-Josh Billings
As a general rule, if you want to get at the truth, hear both sides and believe neither.
-Josh Billings
Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.
-Josh Billings
Advice is like castor oil; easy enough to give, but dreadful uneasy to take.
-Josh Billings
One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.
-Josh Billings
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
-H. L. Mencken
Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
-Jerry Garcia
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
-Mark Twain
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
-Robert R. Coveyou
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
-Walter Lippmann
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
-Edgar Bergen
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
-Abraham Lincoln
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
-Henry Adams
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
-Franklin P. Jones
Never knock on Death’s door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
-Dr. Mike Stratford
If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.
-Ted Turner
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
-Robert Heinlein
Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.
-Robert Heinlein
Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.
-Kin Hubbard
It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
He who thinks by the inch and talks by the yard deserves to be kicked by the foot.
-Anonymous
Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.
-James Thorpe
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.
-Charles Wadsworth
I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.
-Fran Leibowitz
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
-Edgar Bergen
“We come into this world alone… and we leave the same way… the time we spend in between…time spent alive, sharing, learning…together…is all that makes life worth living.” – Jean Grey, after the death of Illyana Rasputin, *X-Men * 303.
“Remy, you are absolutely incorrigible.”
“Yeah, but thinka how much fun it’d be to corrige me.” – Psylocke and Gambit.
“Better to die on your feet than live on your knees!” – Magneto.
I used to work for my dad driving a forklift and I used to love it when we’d get a new guy on the job and at some point he’d complain by saying “That’s not my job,” and my dad would respond by saying “The only thing that isn’t your job is deciding what is and isn’t your job.”
“Such reason in compromised areas, this induction missed.”
-TMW
“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.” ~ H. L. Mencken ~
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~
“You can’t always get what you want.” ~ M. Jagger/K. Richards
“We have met the enemy and it is us.” ~ Walt Kelly, Pogo
“You could park a car in the shadow of his ass.” ~ Geena Davis, in Thelma and Louise
“What have you done to that cat? It looks half dead!” ~ Mrs. Erwin Schrodinger ~
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.” ~ Alexander Jablokov ~
“In my opinion, there’s nothing in this world, Beats a '52 Vincent, and a red headed girl.” ~ Richard Thompson ~
From my sig quotes file.
Tris
Actually, you can thank Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata for that one.
“Nuke 'em til they glow, and shoot 'em in the dark” -unk
“When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight” -bumper sticker on a US Marine Humvee
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. " -Benjamin Franklin
“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.” -H. L. Mencken
“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.” -Charles Bukowski
“Sex is interesting, but it’s not totally important. I mean it’s not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.” -Charles Bukowski
You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. – John Buchan
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff – it is a palliative rather than a remedy. – Peter De Vries
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
In time, the Deity perceived that Death was a mistake; a mistake in that it was insufficient; insufficient for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for inflicting misery on the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be contrived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.
– Mark Twain, Letters From The Earth
It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize. – Robert Mallet
“Whom are you?” said he, for he had been to night school. – George Ade
“Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” – George Burns
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: “My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.” This stranger is a theologian.
– Diderot
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain
. . . behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. . . – Job 28:28
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. – Bertrand Russell
(The French are) Germans with food. – Fran Lebowitz
If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
– Alice Roosevelt Longworth
“You have it backwards: it is better to live on your feet, than to die on your knees.”
Old Man (Catch 22)
Tony, I keep a journal for exactly the same purpose. And this thread has added to it nicely!
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpiller calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach, Illusions
The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and willfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.
Frater Achad
Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
Goethe
I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlow
Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment when a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Jorge Luis Borge
God is a comic playing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
Death is as sure for that which is born, as birth is for that which has died. Therefore grieve not for that which is inevitable.
The Bhagavad-Gita
I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.
Mohandas Gandhi
In the beginning, the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams
I am such a quote junkie…
And men must sometime for the manner sake be not aknowen what they know. For at the consecration of a bishop, every man woteth well, by the paying for his bulls, that he purposeth to be one, and though he pay for nothing else. And yet must he be twice asked whether he will be bishop or no, and he must twice say nay, and at the third time take it as compelled therunto by his own will. And in a stage play all the people know right well that he that playeth the sowdaine is percase a sowter. Yet if one should can so little good to show out of season what acquaintance he hath with him and call him by his own name while he standeth in his majesty, one of his tormentors might hap to break his head, and worthy, for marring of the play. And so they said that these matters be kings’ games, as it were, stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds, in which poor men be the lookers-on. And they that wise be will meddle no farther. For they that sometime step up and play with them, when they cannot play their parts, they disorder the play and do themself no good.
– St. Thomas More, The History of King Richard III
For if hevene be on this erthe, and ese to any soule,
It is in cloister or in scole, by many skiles I fynde.
For in cloistre cometh no man to querele ne to fighte,
But al is buxomnesse there and bokes, to rede and to lerne.
In scole there is skile, and scorn but if he lerne,
And gret love and likyng, for ech of hem lereth oother.
– William Langland, Piers Plowman X.299-304
Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
What if within the Moones faire shining spheare,
What if in euery other starre vnseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare?
He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.
– Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book II, Proem 3.4-9
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”
And there seems to be so much strength in me now that I shall overcome all things, all suffering, so that I may say, say to myself every moment: I am! In thousands of agonies – I am, writhing on the rack – but I am! I may sit in prison but I, too, exist, I see the sun; and if I do not see the sun, I know that it is. And to know that the sun is – that alone is the whole of life.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful. – His Holiness The Dalai Lama
I never said anything, for I knew that if I explained what I was up to, he would smile. I dare say you have seen a stubborn man smile and you know it is like the smile of a deaf man, of a man who does not want to hear and will not listen. When you see that smile you wish instantly that a special kind of mallet existed for the cracking of such men s skulls. – Gontran De Poncius, Kabloona
“You’re sworn to uphold and defend whatever wrongheaded, incompetent, self-serving, slicky - slicky, totally corrupt interpretation of the constitution that a gang of avaricious hillbillies and lying shysters decide …Your type has never let the suffering of innocent people stand in the way of doing that duty; even your conscience, if you still have one, wouldn’t stand in the way. Sooner or later, the narrow channel that’s open in your mind would be flooded with fear and ambition; you’d hear duty calling, you’d hear the power and the glory and the right and the might and the Yankee and the Doodle calling…you’re still a willing cog in the big ugly wheel of patriarchal progress, and those birds on your epaulets are predator birds. You’re going to have to dance with the one’s who brung you, colonel.” – Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Behind the ostensible govenment sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsiblity to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politic, it the first task of the statesmanship of today. (sorry not attribution)
Theodore Roosevelt, 1913
“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
– Isaiah 55:12
A friend will help you move, but a really good friend will help you move a body.
–bumpersticker
A few more brief ones:
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
– John Buchan (also attrib. to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen)
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
– P. J. O’Rourke
The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive – you are leaking.
– Fran Lebowitz
Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion-picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word “collectible” as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.
– Fran Lebowitz
Spilling your guts is just exactly as charming as it sounds.
– Fran Lebowitz
(Bisexuality) immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
– Woody Allen
I mean, who would want to live in a place where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light? (Re: Los Angeles)
– Woody Allen
Don’t knock masturbation – it’s sex with someone I love.
– Woody Allen
Women want mediocre men, and men are working as hard to become mediocre as possible.
– Margaret Mead
I dislike arguments. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
– Oscar Wilde
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
– Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
– Oscar Wilde
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
– Mark Twain
Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.
– Jules Renard
In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by want of it.
– Benjamin Franklin
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.
– Mark Twain
From a famous liberal:
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-Eugene V. Debs