QOTD category archive

Will Rogers:

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

Voltaire (who seems to have foreseen Twitter and Facebook):

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

Wendell Wilkie:

Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

Mignon McLaughlin, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Nobody really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.

John Maynard Keynes, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

I do not know which makes a man more conservative–to
know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Lawrence Lessig, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history–free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

Thomas Hardy, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Bruce Sterling:

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable.

Alexander Pope:

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

Joan Rivers:

People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

Gertrude Stein:

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

John Irving, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

I don’t go out of my way to find or invent things that are bizarre. It just seems to me that I notice more and more how commonplace the bizarre is.

John Hope Franklin:

We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world.

Carl Rowan:

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.

Jay Gould, Nineteenth Century Wall Street Bonus Baby:

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

Clark Kerr:

The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.

P. G. Wodehouse:

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

Cleveland Amory:

I can’t take a well-tanned person seriously.