QOTD category archive

Byron, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.

Niccolo Machiavelli:

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

John Maynard Keynes:

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Henry David Thoreau:

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Edgar Allan Poe, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Daniel Webster, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

G. K. Chesterton, via Andrew Sullivan:

If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ.

Martin Luther King, Jr, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

John Dos Passos, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

Dave Barry, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Stuffwise we are not a lean operation. We’re the kind of people who, if we were deciding what absolute minimum essential items we’d need to carry in our backpacks for thefinal, treacherous ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, would take along aquarium filters, just in case.

Baltasar Gracian, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Yes and No are words quickly said, but they need a great amount of thought before you utter them.

Alexander Hamiltion, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

Andrew Dickson White, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic’s creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

Eric Hoffer:

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

Jim Morrison:

Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence.

Additional reading here.

Will Rogers:

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

Henry Ford:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

At our pre-meeting TWUUG dinner last night, we had a new participant from Finland. One of the guys told a story of wearing a “Planet Hollywood Helsinki” tee shirt, which he bought as a souvenir of a visit to Finland, to the grocery store (I would have bought something a little more Finlandish than a U. S.-based restaurant chain tee shirt, but that’s me).

The checkout cherk asked him, “Where’s Helsinki?”

“Finland.”

Then she asked, “Is that a New England state?”

Thus today’s quote of the day, from Ambrose Bierce:

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

Robert Anton Wilson:

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Kurt Vonnegut:

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.