QOTD category archive

Kenneth Clark:

It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Margaret Atwood:

War is what happens when language fails.

John Mannarino:

When we live in a nation transformed from the “land of the free and the home of the brave” to the “land of the me and home of the knave,” it is easier to understand how Donald Trump got reelected.

Letter to the Editor, The Virginian Pilot, November 29, 2024, p. 15

Buckminster Fuller:

Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

H. G. Wells:

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

Andre Gide:

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

William Anton, in the voice of Assistant D.A. George Donovan:

The people who gave us golf and called it a game are the same people who gave us bagpipes and called it music.

Afterthought:

I used to shoot pool–indeed, I once had my own table–so I understand golf. Your opponent is the ball, not the other players

But, honest to Betsy, I just couldn’t let this quote go by.

T.P. McKenna, in the voice of Erroll McLaverty:

It’s hard work being honest, but it’s not unheard of.

Cliff Schecter:

Whether you like it or not, Donald Trump has dragged us into a WWE culture.

W. Somerset Maugham:

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Clarence Darrow:

Man does not live by truth, but by the illusions that his brain conceives.

Roger Bacon:

To ask the proper question is half of knowing.

Theodore Roosevelt:

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Alison Golden and Grace Dagnall, in the thoughts of Inspector Graham as he takes notes using (gasp!) a notepad:

It was easy to appear a dinosaur these days if you hadn’t turned over the running of your life . . . to a couple of gadgets.

Golden, Alison and Dagnall, Grace, The Case of the Screaming Beauty in
The Inspector Graham Mysteries 1-4 (San Carlos: Mesa Verde, 2915) p.46.

Brian France:

Rumors are always interesting, but they’re seldom right.

Shirley Monticue, as Girl Beatnik:

Do you believe we should give people the vote before educating them to use it wisely?

I’m so old, I can remember when public schools taught civics (at my school, the course was called “Government,” but rose by any other name etc.).

Methinks not doing so has not turned out very well.

Walter Lippmann:

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

Lawrence J. Peter:

A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.