QOTD category archive

Leonard Bernstein:

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

Fran Tarkenton:

If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.

Aside: Complaining lefties who haven’t realized that there is no magic wand in politics would do well to remember this.

Alexander Woollcote:

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it.

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

The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.

Franklin Roosevelt:

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Garrison Keillor, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It’s important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.

Robert Benchley:

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

Rex Stout:

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

Isabelle Allende, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

He realized . . . that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.

H. L. Mencken:

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Winston Churchill:

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Somerset Maugham:

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.

George Bernard Shaw, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Rex Stout, quoted by his daughter, Rebecca Stout Bradbury, in the introduction to The Bloodied Ivy:

An educated person is one who has the capacity to distinguish the important from the unimportant . . . .

Somerset Maugham:

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

Alexandre Dumas, pere, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.

Mark Twain:

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

Ernest Hemingway, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

William Makepeace Thackery, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

George Carlin, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.