QOTD category archive

James Beard, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.

Horace Mann, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.

Golda Meir, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

Mardel Grothe, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

In all human affairs, the wisest course is to be passionate about the role of reason and reasonable about the role of passion.

Fran Lebowitz, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Now, nature, as I am only too aware, has her enthusiasts, but on the whole, I am not to be counted among them. To put it bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

Desmond Tutu, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

Red Skelton:

Exercise? I get it on the golf course. When I see my friends collapse, I run for the paramedics.

David Ogden Stiers:

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.

Eugene O’Neill:

When men make gods, there is no God!

Georgia O’Keefe:

I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

Terry McAuliffe:

Someone who lies about the little things will lie about the big things too.

Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Edward Gorey:

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.

Linda Ellerbee:

If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?

Bette Davis:

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

Michelangelo:

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Alfred Loisy:

It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.

Albert J. Nock:

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

George Santayana:

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Pat Sajak:

That’s the trouble with trying to influence an undecided voter. First you have to find one.