QOTD category archive

Nicolai Tesla, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

To stop war by the perfection of engines of destruction alone, might consume centuries and centuries. Other means must be employed to hasten the end.

Franklin Roosevelt:

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; now we know that it is bad economics.

H. L. Mencken:

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Pat Paulsen, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.

On this date in 1776,the Declaration of Independence was signed. (It was read to the public on the Fourth, signed on the Sixth. The Founders expected that, if the revolution be* not crushed, the Sixth of July would be the day of celebration.)

George Mason, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We are now to rank among the nations of the world; but whether our Independence shall prove a blessing or a curse must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness…. Justice and virtue are the vital principles of republican government.

__________________

*Look, Mrs. Shannonhouse: Subjunctive Voice.

(I wish she could look. Italian war bride to an American GI, graduate of Middlebury College, 12th-grade English teacher, French III teacher. Fluent in English, Spanish, French, and her native Italian–so fluent in Spanish that she could take Spanish shorthand–the best teacher of English I had, and a gentle lady. RIP, Mrs. Shannonhouse. Your students remember.)

Tom Stoppard, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Thurgood Marshall, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony, or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

Seen on a tee shirt:

Silence is golden.
Duct tape is silver.

George Orwell, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Henry Ward Beecher, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

Paul Buchheit:

To anyone who cries socialism at the first hint of taxes, do you want to accept a system that says a person making a clever bet on the market is 50,000 times more valuable than the person who comes rushing to your house in an emergency?

Or 50,000 times cleverer?

Winston Churchill:

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Mark Twain, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Actually, never had such thoughts about my father. He was a good father and a role model.

If I am half the man he was, I can be proud.

Paul McCartney, from the from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn’t weird at all and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.

Mario Cuomo, from the Quotemaster:

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, from the Quotemaster:

To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.

Francis Burney, from the Quotemaster:

The mind naturally accommodates itself, even to the most ridiculous improprieties, if they occur frequently.

David Mitchell in the Guardian:

We’re quite keen on mammalian killers such as lions and bears and it’s experience, rather than repulsion, that dissuades us from petting them. And few would seriously argue that the animals that induce the cute reflex are morally superior to sharks or crocodiles. Cats are clearly psychos.

Will Rogers, from the Quotemaster:

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

I’ve been to Cincinnati. It’s a nice town in northern Kentucky.

Paul Gauguin, from the Quotemaster:

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

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