QOTD category archive

Pindar:

War is sweet to those who have no experience of it, but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach.

Ross Martin, in the voice of Andamo:

With my luck, if my ship ever came in, there’s be a dock strike.

Ivan Illich:

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

Barry Goldwater:

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

Tom Baker:

Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life.

Jesse Jackson:

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven’t melted.

Franz Kafka:

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Max Born:

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.

Hannah Arendt:

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

W. Somerset Maugham, in the voice of the teller of the tale. The teller summarizes the story of the temptation of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew, then continues:

That was the end of according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn’t. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: It thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross, thou shalt save the human race, for no man hath greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.

Maugham, W. Somerset, The Razor’s Edge, in a collection with five
other of his novels (New York: Heinemann and Oyster, 1980) p. 472

Rudyard Kipling:

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

T. S. Eliot:

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Michael Elphick, in the voice of Ken Boon:

It’s not where you start. It’s where you finish.

Sophocles:

A wise doctor does not mutter incantations over a sore that needs the knife.

Groucho Marx:

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

Ken Burns:

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Will Rogers:

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Henry Miller:

The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.

Mencius:

He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man.

Stuart Langridge:

When you can’t decide on a thing, pick the side with the fewest (less than desirable persons–ed.) on it and you quite often come out okay in the process.