From Pine View Farm

QOTD category archive

QOTD 0

George Santayana:

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Share

QOTD 0

Molly Ivins:

When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.

Share

QOTD 0

Will Rogers:

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

Share

QOTD 0

Germaine Greer:

Next time round Hitler will be a machine.

Share

QOTD 0

Boris Karloff, in the voice of Colonel March Of Scotland Yard, and John Arnatt, the voice of Professor Wesley:

Colonel March: Oh, I know that he was a great man, prodigiously accomplished in the Medieval arts and sciences . . . .

Professor Wesley: The black arts, the black sciences.

Colonel March: Well, all art, all science is black, as you very well know, until it’s understood.

Share

QOTD 0

Gene Roddenberry:

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Share

QOTD 0

James A. Garfield:

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not be a fool, which, if I may judge by the exhibitions around me, is a matter of no small difficulty.

Share

QOTD 0

Bob Cesca:

You would think with the internet people would be more informed, but they’re actually less informed and even more they’re badly dis-informed.

Share

QOTD 0

Euripides:

The lucky person passes for a genius.

Share

QOTD 0

Joseph Campbell:

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Share

QOTD 0

Jean de la Bruyere:

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

Share

QOTD 0

Phaedrus:

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master’s name.

Share

QOTD 0

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.

Share

QOTD 0

T. S. Eliot:

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Share

QOTD 0

Henry David Thoreau:

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Share

QOTD 0

Roald Dahl:

It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.

Share

QOTD 0

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.

Share

QOTD 0

Goodman Ace:

TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing’s well done.

Share

QOTD 0

Ken Burns:

I subscribe to William Faulkner’s’ view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

Share

QOTD 0

P. D. James:

She had always believed–somewhat to her surprise–that God existed but was unconvinced that he was moved by the worship of man or by the tribulations and extraordinary vagaries and antics of the creation He had set in being.

James, P. D., The Murder Room (New York: Knopf, 2003) p. 49

Share