QOTD category archive

H. L. Mencken, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Robert Orben:

A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.

I’m back.

Voltaire:

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Queen Elizabeth I, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

Aside: The internet had not been invented when she said that.

Samuel Butler:

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

Clarence Darrow:

History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.

John Cusack:

Death is a billion-dollar business. They can’t even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don’t you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver’s license? It’s totally insane.

Horace Walpole:

Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie.

Rex Stout:

Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough leisure for humanity.

Too Many Cooks (New York: Pyramid, 1974), p. 43.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

P. J. O’Rourke:

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.

Walt Kelly, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We gotta make democracy safe for the world.

Gene Weingarten:

There is no such thing as middle of the road. By definition. The middle of the road is a line; in physics, a line has only one dimension: Length. It has no width. Ergo, your politics must fall on one side or the other; I am merely compelling you to choose.

Mark Twain:

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

John Kenneth Galbraigth:

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

Ann Landers:

. . . the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

A free America… means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

Hubert Humphrey, the Happy Warrior, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

Bernard Baruch, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

There is something about inside information which seems to paralyse a man’s reasoning powers.

Afterthought:

This accounts for much of the Washington punditocracy’s fascination with itself.

Emile Durkheim:

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.