QOTD category archive

Arthur Ashe, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.

Bill Cosby, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Sigmund Freud once said, ‘What do women want?’ The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that.

H. L. Mencken, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

George Orwell:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Voltaire:

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

George Orwell, in 1941:

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.

Richard Hofstadter:

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

Daniel Boorstin:

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

Man Ray:

All critics should be assassinated.

Diane Arbus:

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

Franz Kafka, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Lena Horne, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

You have to be taught to be second class; you’re not born that way.

Charles Kuralt, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Nora Ephron, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Family ties weekend.

QOTD will be holding down the fort.

George Orwell:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Howard Zinn:

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Bill Vaughan:

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Arnold J. Toynbee:

I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.

Tacitus:

It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.