Quotes

You know who I idolized? Mr. Rogers. Is there a market for the next Mr. Rogers? Because I'd love to do that. I'd much rather be quiet and important like him than live large and be some useless celebrity.
Clay Aiken

The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. Your lover couldn't have seen [these qualities] in you, even temporarily, if they weren't part of your essential being.
Martha Beck, O Magazine, February 2003

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
William Blake

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
Napoleon Bonaparte

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
Jimmy Carter

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
John Ciardi

The best things in life don't make sense.
Alice Cooper

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange misture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a french woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American.
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer III: What is an American?

What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.
Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982), The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick

Where the people fear the government you have tyranny; where the government fears the people, you have liberty.
William Feather

Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure.
Piero Ferrucci

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Redd Foxx

You don't need a lot of the stuff you think you need.
Jason Fried, Keynote Speech, SXSW 2006

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
R. Buckminster Fuller

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the steward of life's continutity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to to it, but here we are.
Stephen Jay Gould

Some day my boat will come in, and with my luck I'll be at the airport.
Graffito

Don't mourn, Organize.
Joe Hill, Last words - reputed before excuted by a Utah firing squad

And now, in keeping with Channel 40's policy of always bringing you the latest in blood and guts, in living color, you're about to see another first--an attempted suicide.
Christine Hubbock, who shot herself during a broadcast

I have found you an argument: but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Samuel Johnson

There is nothing like a newborn baby to renew your spirit - and to buttress your resolve to make the world a better place.
Virginia Kelley

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
Michael Korda

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Lenin

I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C. S. Lewis

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

If someone tells you he is going to make ``a realistic decision,' you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad.
Mary McCarthy

You can choose your behavior, the world chooses your consequences.
Pia Melody

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken

If you achieve success, you will get applause, and if you get applause, you will hear it. My advice to you concerning applause is this; enjoy it but never quite believe it.
Robert Montgomery

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Edward R. Murrow

Good food ends with good talk.
Geoffrey Neighor, Northern Exposure, Duets, 1993

Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.
Ed Norton, Entertainment Weekly

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
Plato

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Gail Pool

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
Terry Pratchett

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow."
Mary Anne Radmacher

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Nothing anyone says in a bar is true.
Mark Ruffalo, In Style Magazine, 11-08

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) act 1

Taking one's chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.
Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Slippery Slope

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another.
Jonathan Swift

A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.
Hunter S. Thompson

Hana: What on Earth is a 'barbeque'?
Hel: A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer.
Hana: I daren't ask what a 'hush puppy' is.
Hel: Don't.
Trevanian from the novel "Shibumi"

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
Lao-tzu

You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine.
Flip Wilson

Wisdom and spirit of the Universe!
Thou soul is the eternity of thought!
That giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! Not in vain
By day or star-light thus from by first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
William Wordsworth

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Frank Zappa

Too many people run out of ideas long before they run out of words.
Author Unknown

You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a child to have only two parents.
Australian Aboriginal Elder

A person should want to live, if only out of curiosity.
Yiddish Proverb