QOTD category archive

Henry B. Adams:

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Mark Twain, from Following the Equator:

The only difference that I know of between a silent lie and a spoken one is, that the silent lie is a less respectable one than the other.

Mark Twain:

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

Rabelais:

I won’t undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.

Michel de Montaigne:

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

Peter Drucker:

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

Gladstone:

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

Theodore Roosevelt:

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

Thomas Aquinas:

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

Emma Goldman:

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

Bertrand Russell, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Abraham Lincoln:

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Gary Larson:

Great moments in science: Einstein discovers that time is actually money.

Thomas Jefferson:

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

H. L. Mencken:

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

Earl Long:

I can make them voting machines sing Home Sweet Home.

Al Smith:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

Franklin Roosevelt:

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

George Carlin:

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

Sir Walter Raleigh, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

All histories do shew, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.