QOTD category archive

Evan Esar:

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

Robert Fulghum, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Above all, if what you’ve done is stupid, but it works, it ain’t stupid.

Malcolm Forbes:

By the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it.

Richard Dawkins, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.

Hubert Humphrey, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Maximilian Robespierre:

The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.

Bob Molinaro:

I’ve learned that facts don’t matter. Facts are an inconvenient impediment to the endless stream of conjecture and blather.

Augusten Burroughs:

Have you ever watched a single abysmal YouTube cover of a song? Dreams are not alway beautiful things.

Psychology Today, June 2012, p. 29

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

John Kenneth Galbraith:

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

James Beard, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.

Mardel Grothe, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

Thomas Huxley, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

Mark Twain, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

William Petty:

Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.

Robert Heilbroner:

The cure for capitalism’s failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

Hodding Carter, II, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.

Mark Twain, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.

Wendell Wilkie

And political parties, overanxious for vote catching, become tolerant to intolerant groups.

Bram Fischer:

The glaring injustice (of apratheid) is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.