QOTD category archive

Judith Martin (Miss Manners), from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The invention of the teenager was a mistake, in Miss Manners’ opinion…. Once you identify a period of life in which people have few restrictions and, at the same time, few responsibilities – they get to stay out late but don’t have to pay taxes – naturally, nobody wants to live any other way.

H. L. Mencken, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here). The Quotemaster has been on a roll lately:

Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn’t they’d be married, too.

Cyril Connelly, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

Henry A. Wallace:

What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.

Leo Tolstoy, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

History would be a wonderful thing–if it were only true.

Walter Winchell, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.

David Mamet:

Those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

Playboy, (vol. 51, no. 1) January 2004, p. 139.

Robert M. Pirsig, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Daniel Webster, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and heerfulness.

Corporate jets, bonuses, and stock options, on the other hand, seem to breed the opposite.

Soren Kierkegaard:

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

Robert Wilson Lynd:

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

Ulysses S. Grant:

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Robert Wilson Lynd:

Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them.

Marshall McLuhan, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.

Allen Funt:

When people are smiling they are most receptive to almost anything you want to teach them.

J. William Fulbright:

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

Joseph Priestly:

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

G. K. Chesterton, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Afterthought:

This is impetus for the Republican War on Science

George Chapman, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

And let a scholar all earth’s volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.