Quotations Automn 2009

1- There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
- Denis Diderot

2- The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.
- Foster's Law

3- Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

4- The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
- Ronald Reagan

5- I have often depended on the blindness of strangers. 
- Adrienne E. Gusoff

6- You're never too old to become younger.
- Mae West

7- The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.

8- If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas then each of us will have two ideas.
- George Bernard Shaw

9- Learn as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
- Mahatma Gandhi

10- Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
- Bertolt Brecht

11- 'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
- Abraham Lincoln

12- I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.
- Henny Youngman

13- If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
- Sir Francis Bacon

14- Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.
- Mickey Mouse

15- He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.
- David Frost

16- When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
- George Bernard Shaw

17- I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
- Harry S Truman

18- Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.
- George Carlin

19- In America , through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
- Peter Ustinov

20- When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
- Thomas Szasz

21- You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
- Sacha Guitry

22- Men have become the tools of their tools.
- Henry David Thoreau

23- Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
- Thomas H. Huxley

24- The average person thinks he isn't.
- Father Larry Lorenzoni

25- Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
- Christopher Hampton

26- The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
- Daniel Webster

27- I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone wants to get a hold of me, they just say 'Mitch,' and I say 'what?' and turn my head slightly.
- Mitch Hedberg

28- A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
- William Ralph Inge

29- Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off.
- Ellen DeGeneres

30- My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
- Rodney Dangerfield

31- When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.
- W. S. Gilbert

32- The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
- Bertrand Russell

33- The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

34- Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.
- James F. Byrnes

35- There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.
- Samuel Johnson

36- One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
- William Feather

37- Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
- WH Auden

38- There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
- Edith Wharton

39- A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
- Burt Bacharach

40- That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
- Paul Valery

41- What happens when the future has come and gone?
- Robert Half

42- One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. - Randall Jarrell

43- I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
- Ray Bradbury

44- Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
- Bertrand Russell

45- Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
- Walter Lippmann

46- "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Pablo Picasso

47- "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
- Voltaire

48- The best car safety device is a rear-view mirror with a cop in it.
- Dudley Moore

49- In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell

50- And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
- Earl Mac Rauch

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

52- "So foul a sky shall not clear without a storm,"
- William Shakespeare

53- The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson

54- There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
- Ambrose Bierce

55- There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
- Cyril Connolly

56- The best way out is always through.
- Robert Frost

57- I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
- ee cummings

58- We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
- Anais Nin

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

60- Some things have to be believed to be seen.
- Ralph Hodgson

61- Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
- Albert Schweitzer

61- There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
- Victor Hugo

63- To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
- Gustave Flaubert

64- "When you think you have all the answers to the questions in your life, the questions change."
- Anonymous

65- Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
- James M. Barrie

66- I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
- Mitch Hedberg

67- He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have.
- Don Juan Manuel

68- If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
- Robert X. Cringely

69- Life is a zoo in a jungle.
- Peter De Vries

70- The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
- Arthur Koestler

71- I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson

72- I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
- Pablo Picasso

73- Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?"/ Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
- Charles M. Schulz

74- Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

75- A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
- William James

76- "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."
- Anonymous

77- "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
- Michael Jordan

78- Dance like it hurts,/ Love like you need money,/ Work when people are watching.
- Scott Adams

79- Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
- Albert Camus

80Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
- Mahatma Gandhi

81- Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.
- Suzanne Necker

82- If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton

83- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
- Leo Tolstoy

84- It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

85- The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
- Benjamin Disraeli

86- The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.
- Horace Walpole

87- Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
- Rene Descartes

88- Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
- Thomas Fuller

89- My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.
- Rita Rudner

90- Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

91- People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
- Soren Kierkegaard

92- Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
- Bertrand Russell

93- Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
- Marie Curie

94- My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.
- Henny Youngman

95- 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

96- If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
- Elbert Hubbard

97- The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay

98- Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
- Lily Tomlin

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

100- The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.
- William Feather

101- 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

102- Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right.
- Kurt Herbert Alder

103- It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld

104- Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
- Samuel Johnson

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

106- The world is round; it has no point.
- Adrienne E. Gusoff

107- Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
- Robert Frost

108- Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

109- I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson

110- There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
- Pablo Picasso

111- Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
- Voltaire

112- "The best sense of humor belongs to the man who can laugh at himself."
- Anonymous

123- Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
- Woody Allen

114- Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.
- Woody Allen

115- The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
- Bertrand Russell

116- It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
- Charles Baudelaire

117- Reminds me of my safari in Africa . Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
- W. C. Fields

118- Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
- Artemus Ward

119- I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
- Jules Renard

120- The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
- Bertrand Russell

121- It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'
- Sam Levenson

122- When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong-- or absolutely right.
- Albert Guinon

123- When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
- Mark Twain