QOTD category archive

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be distrusted.

Stout, Rex, Champagne for One (New York: Bantam, 2009), p. 71 (Double-volume with Too Many Cooks).

Artemus Ward (pen name of Charles Farrar Browne):

The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.

Wendy Kaminer:

If we all don’t enjoy the same rights, then no one enjoys any rights at all; some of us merely enjoy privilege.

Maria Edgeworth:

We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.

Ba Jin:

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

Douglas Adams:

A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

Benjamin Disraeli:

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Vladimir Nabakov:

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Abba Eban:

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Lech Walesa:

You can’t change the facts with your lies, allegations and counterfeits.

Edmund Crispin:

But Masters was not wise. He was only clever.

Crispin, Edmund (pen name of Bruce Montgomery), “After Evensong” in Fen Country (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 92.

Lu Xun:

I used to think that a man was sentenced to death or imprisonment because he was guilty; now I know that he is found guilty because he is disliked.

Havelock Ellis:

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

Edmund Crispin, in the voice of Sergeant Beeton:

But in spite of that, you couldn’t help liking him–same way you would like a cat, provided you keep your pet goldfish out of his reach.

Crispin, Edmund (pen name for Bruce Montgomery), “Black for a Funeral”
in Beware of the Trains (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 98.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Archie Goodwin:

You can’t look down your nose at someone when he is standing and you are sitting.

Stout, Rex, Champagne for One (in a double volume with Too Many Cooks
which if you haven’t read it you should) (New York: Bantam, 2009), p. 147.

Doris Haddock:

Democracy is not something we have, it’s something we do.

Henri Estienne:

If youth knew; if age could.

Tim Berners-Lee:

We can’t blame the technology when we make mistakes.

Albert Camus:

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Quintus Ennius:

They hate whom they fear.