QOTD category archive

Polybius:

All things are subject to decay and change.

Marcus Aurelius:

He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man’s acts.

Fawn M. Brodie:

A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

Gertrude Stein:

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Richard Rohr:

Power should be entrusted only to those who do not seek it.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

Courtesy is one’s own affair, but decency is a debt to life.

Stout, Rex, Too Many Cooks (New York: Bantam, 2009), p. 61.

William Feather:

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.

Stephen Vizinczey:

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.

John Nettles as Inspector Barnaby and Laura Howard as his daughter, Cully Barnaby:

Cully Barnaby: So, how’s your witch hunt?

Inspector Barnaby: The witch hunt is not concluded.

Cully Barnaby: Witch hunts never are. You burn one, you have to find another.

John Astin, as Gomez Addams:

There is only one thing we can do. Worry.

Hunter S. Thompson:

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Elizabeth Edwards:

I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.

Farrah Fawcett:

The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think.

Dixy Lee Ray:

Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.

Cory Doctorow:

Things are true or they aren’t, no matter how old the person saying them happens to be.

Phoebe Nicholls, in the voice of Laura Smythe-Webster:

Simon is resolutely Christian. Everything is God’s will. It’s a very convenient way of looking at things, really. It means nothing is ever anyone’s fault.

Pete Seeger:

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.

Afterthought:

Karl Marx was an excellent economist, but a lousy prophet. His analysis of the past was as accurate as his prediction of the future fantastickal.

I have long believed that his prophet’s vision of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” leading to a world of “from each according to his abilities to each according to his means” was a desperate, deluded fantasy–an intellectual short-circuit–born of his economist seeing no way to escape capitalist dystopia.

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Christopher Hitchins:

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Peter Senge:

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

Daniel Defoe:

Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.