QOTD category archive

Holbrook Jackson:

Suffer fools gladly; they may be right.

Ron Kaufman:

You’ve got one mouth and two ears. There’s a reason.

Vladimir Nabakov:

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Earl Warren:

Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.

Edmund Crispin:

(Upon the finding of the victim in a mystery story–ed.) She had been an attractive girl. But that “had been” was not a conventional gesture to the fact of death. It was an honest admission that without life the most beautiful body is an object of no interest. We are not bodies, thought Nigel, we are lives.

Crispin, Edmund (real name, Bruce Montgomery), The Case of the Gilded Fly (London: Bloomsbury, 12018), p. 80-81.

Judith Kelman:

Life, I tell my sons, is what happens when you are making other plans.

Kelman, Judith, “Introduction” to Rex Stout’s Curtains for Three (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. vi

Jonathan Swift:

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Arthur Machen:

It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach:

Nowadays people are born to find fault. When they look at Achilles, they see only his heel.

H. H. Munro:

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

Harry Belafonte:

I have very little regard for consensus if it blinds you to the truth.

Viktor Frankl:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Edmund Crispin, the voice of Gervase Fen:

You think it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. Only, sooner or later, they wake up of their own
accord . . . .

Crispin, Edmund (pen name of Bruce Montgomery), “The Drowning of Edgar Foley”
in Beware of the Trains (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 34.

Humphrey Bogart:

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.

Fred Dwyer (as Det. Sgt Rick Hunter) and Stephanie Kramer (as Det. Sgt. Dee Dee McCall):

Hunter: What are the basic food groups–the four basic food groups?
McCall: Dine in, take out, frozen, and canned.

Aside:

Light bloggery this weekend.

Pete Hamill:

For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.

William Gaddis:

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Demosthenes:

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them.

George Jessel:

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn’t stop until you get up to deliver a speech.

Hilary Putnam:

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.