QOTD category archive

Herb Caen:

A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.

Edward de Bono:

You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.

Eugene McCarthy:

Remember that the worst accidents occur in the middle of the road.

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John LeCarre (2003):

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

He is a self-styled public relations counselor–one of the various modern activities that are an insult to the dignity of man.

Stout, Rex, The Father Hunt (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 169

William Makepiece Thackery:

He was always thinking of his brother’s soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him in opinion. It is the sort of comfort which many of the serious give themselves.

Aside:

I’m reading the ebook of Vanity Fair from Project Gutenberg, so page numbers are meaningless. The quotation comes from the penultimate paragraph of chapter X.

Thackery’s style is verbose (as was that of most Victorian authors), conversational, and quite surprisingly snarky. I recommend the book, but caution you not to expect to breeze through it.

Charles James Fox:

It is intolerable that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief.

Aside:

He was speaking of George III of England, but the words still ring true, do they not?

Georges Clemenceau:

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

William Henry Harrison:

…there is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

Rex Stout:

When two people who want to get along start needing to have things explained, look out.

Stout, Rex, The Father Hunt (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 97.

Euripides:

Cleverness is not wisdom.

Ennius:

The idle mind knows not what it wants.

John Adams:

The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.

William Howard Taft:

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Buzz Burbank:

Trump has proven that you can lie about anything and . . . certain people won’t care if they like your hatred.

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Rex Stout, in the voice of Julie Jaquette:

When people’s brains stop working, just go somewhere else.

Stout, Rex, Death of a Doxy (New York: Bantam, 1995), p. 78.

H. G. Wells:

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

B. F. Skinner:

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

David Gerrold:

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

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Rex Stout, in the voice of Archie Goodwin:

One of the brain’s most efficient departments is the one that turns possibilities into probabilities, and probabilities into facts.

Stout, Rex, Too Many Clients (New York: Bantam, 1971), P. 123.