QOTD category archive

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Aldous Huxley:

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Arthur Schopenhauer:

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

James Branch Cabell:

While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.

Bennett Cerf:

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

Dorothy Parker:

There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Jeremy Bentham:

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

Josephine Tey:

When a man’s personality is entirely facade, . . . it was dfficult to decide how much of the facade was barricading and how much was mere poster-hoarding.

Tey, Josephine (Elizabeth MacKintosh), To Love and Be Wise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020) p. 126

William James:

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Paul Auster:

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Taylor Caldwell:

It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.

Alexander Woollcott:

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it.

Margot Fonteyn:

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time:

It is an odd think, but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset.

Aside:

I wonder if I somehow inadvertently got some kind of bootleg copy. Per the cover, it was printed in Columbia, SC, on 2020-11-08, but it bears no publishers imprint and the pages are numbers, nor are there any chapter headings.

The quotation, in any event, rings true.

James Randi:

Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

Peter Dicken:

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

Tom Baker, in the voice of Donald MacDonald, and Martin Compston, in the voice of Ewan Brodie:

Donald: Sentimentality is the curse of the working classes.

Ewan: No, Don. The curse of the working classes is the upper classes.

Aside:

One more time, if you can find Monarch of the Glen, watch it (I know it is currently on Tubitv.com). It is a superb series.

Henry Martyn Robert:

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

Anne Rice:

We’re frightened of what makes us different.