QOTD category archive

Kerry Thornley:

Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?

Sue Grafton:

Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we’re all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily … life is only ours on loan.

Patrice Lamumba:

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

Charles Dudley Warner:

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

Walter Lippmann:

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Archie Goodwin:

If your ego is in good shape, you will pretend you are surprised if a National Chairman calls to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you’re not really surprised.

Stout, Rex, Champagne for One (New York: Bantam, 2009), p. 3 (Double-volume with Too Many Cooks).

Tom Bodett:

Did you ever notice that nobody you see on television looks like anyone you know?

Ricky Gervais:

You have options. You can either continue to be miserable or you can just stop being angry at everyone and accept the way things are. Allow yourself to live.

Benvenuto Cellini:

When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs.

Philip Bosco, as David McVane:

Life’s not fair. It’s not even close. At best, all we can expect, is that, as time goes by, the system levels it out.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Archie Goodwin:

There is no point in being rude when you can end a conversation quicker by being polite.

Stout, Rex, Plot It Yourself, (New York: Bantam, 1977), p. 77.

Cornel West:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Tom Nichols:

Listening is not the same thing as waiting to say something.

Winston Churchill:

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Maria Edgeworth:

A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

The more you put in a brain, the more it will hold–if you have one.

Stout, Rex, Might as Well Be Dead, (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 94.

Albert Camus:

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Craig Washington (in a floor debate in the Texas legislature about banning flag-burning as a means of protest):

I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag.

H/T to my brother for telling me of this quotation.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Archie Goodwin:

After habits get automatic, you’re no longer aware of them.

Stout, Rex, Might As Well Be Dead (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 19.

Xun Zi:

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.