QOTD category archive

Antisthenes:

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

P. J. O’Rourke, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.

Graham Greene:

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

Harry Truman:

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.

Martin Amis:

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

George Raft:

Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly.

Abigail Adams, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Elizabeth Gilbert, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

Somerset Maugham:

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

Flip Wilson:

Violence is a tool of the ignorant.

Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch:

It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.

Bill Mauldin:

I’m convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else.

Dwight Eisenhower:

The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.

Horace Greeley:

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

Ronald Knox:

It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

Walter Cronkite, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The profession of journalism ought to be about telling people what they need to know, not what they want to know.

James Boswell, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Raymond Smullyan:

Why should I be worried about dying? It’s not going to happen in my lifetime!

Thomas Carlyle:

Teach a parrot the terms ‘supply and demand’ and you’ve got an economist.

Dale Carnegie:

Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.

Rex Stout:

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.