QOTD category archive

Dorothy Sayers:

He’s a devil when he’s drunk and a lout when he’s sober.

Sayers, Dorothy, The Five Red Herrings, in a double-volume with Murder Must Advertise
(Garden City: Doubleday, date unclear [original published in 1931]), p. 11.

Eugene McCarthy:

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Robert Goldsborough, in the voice of Audra Pierce:

I find it amazing how eager some people are to deliver news that might be disturbing to the recipient.

Goldsborough, Robert, Battered Badge (New York: Mysterious Press/Open Road, 2018), p. 128.

Albert Camus:

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

Dorothy Sayers, in the voice of Lord Peter Wimsey:

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the persons who drew it up don’t understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

Sayers, Dorothy, Unnatural Death (New York: Avon, 1964), p. 137.

David Lloyd George:

The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.

William Finnegan:

For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.

Richard Stallman:

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. “Don’t bother us with politics,” respond those who don’t want to learn.

Vivian Bonnell (as Myrtle Washington in Police Woman):

Play with the devil, wind up in Hell.

Pauline Kael:

TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.

Afred Adler:

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Francois Rabelais:

I never follow the clock: hours were made for man, not man for hours.

Philo:

A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial.

Thomas Aquinas:

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Emanuel Cleaver:

The language has changed. When I grew up and watched the campaigns of John Kennedy, even with Richard Nixon, there was a lot higher level of civility. Now we describe a disagreement as an attack.

Junius (pseudonym):

There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

C. Wright Mills:

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

Jack Paar:

Now that man can fly through the air like a bird … and swim in the sea like a fish, wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could just walk the earth like a man?

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

You should know that your only safe secrets are those that you have yourself forgotten.

Stout, Rex, Death of a Doxy (New York: Bantam, 1995), p. 97.

Emile Durkheim:

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is too condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.