quotations
philosophical
literature : quotations
political
- They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- -- Benjamin Franklin, ~1784
- A Board is long and narrow and made out of wood.
- -- Roland Green, describing a committee
- I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.
- -- Mahatma Gandhi
- It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
- -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ... when the sharp-tongued Benjamin Disraeli, so the story goes, was ordered in the last century to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses. `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw,' was Disraeli's response. `Half the cabinet are not asses.'
- -- seen in the Boulder Daily Camera, 26/2/95
- Australian history does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.
- -- Mark Twain
- ... and it always was possible to measure the distance between so-called management and the so-called creative by the time it took for a memo to go in one direction and a half-brick to come back in the other.
- -- Dennis Potter
- I don't use drugs; my dreams are frightening enough.
- -- Maurits Cornelius Escher
- Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- -- Rudyard Kipling
- There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
- -- H. L. Mencken
- If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a Great Scientist. If relativity is proved wrong the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew
- -- Albert Einstein
- Each man has his own way. After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in. You're working, your mind is working, on this problem in the back of your head. So when you get to the machine it's a mere matter of transfer
- -- Henry Miller
- Actually, that was a great British victory. Colonists of British origin fighting for age-old British values against Hessian mercenaries under a German king. No wonder we won.
- -- Overheard on NPR from a British journalist when the American Revolution was mentioned
- I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
- -- J. Edgar Hoover
- I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy - "Dear Jack, Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide."
- -- John F. Kennedy
- Nothing more closely resembles a monastery (lost in the countryside, walled, flanked by alien, barbarian hordes, inhabited by monks who have nothing to do with the world and devote themselves to their private researches) than an American university campus.
- -- Umberto Eco
- Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs -- to kill people and to destroy the works of man.
- -- General Thomas S. Power
- No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
- -- P. T. Barnum.
- How would you like it if you were sitting in your office and you made one little mistake. Suddenly, a big red light went on and 18,000 people jumped up and started screaming at you, calling you a bum and an imbecile and throwing garbage at you. That's what it's like when you play goal in the NHL.
- -- Jacques Plante, Montreal goaltender
- Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
- -- Daniel Webster, 1847