QOTD category archive

Zora Neale Hurston,

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Abraham Lincoln, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Afterthought:

Clearly not how today’s Republican Party prefers to destroy enemies.

e. e. cummings:

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

St. Thomas Aquinas:

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

Harry Shearer:

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

Francis Bacon:

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Alfred Adler,from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Thomas Paine:

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Howard Cosell:

The importance that our society attaches to sport is incredible. After all, is football a game or a religion? The people of this country have allowed sports to get completely out of hand.

Harry S. Truman:

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Walter Bagehot, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.

H. L. Mencken:

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

William Ralph Inge:

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

Thomas Merton, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Barbara Tuchman, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any human activity.

W. C. Fields, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.

Colette, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave

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Admiral Hyman Rickover, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

A system under which it takes three men to check what one is doing is not control; it is systematic strangulation.

Franklin Roosevelt:

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

Virginia Woolf, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It is harder to kill a phantom than a reality.