QOTD category archive

Eliezer Wiesel, from the Quotemaster:

Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.

Paul Buchheit:

The result is a system in which one man (hedge fund manager John Paulson in 2007) can make more money than the total of the salaries of every police officer, firefighter, and public school teacher in Chicago, while another man stands hungry in the cold. And any attempt to fix the system is called socialism.

Philip K. Dick via the Quotemaster:

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’

Dr. Seuss, from the Quotemaster:

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

Charles Darwin, from the Quotemaster:

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Andrew Sullivan:

(Republicans) have shown they don’t really care about the debt; what they care about is power.

George Harrison, via the Quotemaster:

As long as you hate, there will be people to hate.

Sinclair Lewis, from the Quotemaster:

All of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.

Albert Einstein, from the Quotemaster:

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!

And a bonus, also from the Quotemaster. Solzhenitsyn:

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

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From Samir Selmanovic in It’s Really All about God:

I was tired of hope, and fear began to creep in.

George Burns, via the Quotemaster:

When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I’m labeled senile.

Teddy Roosevelt, via the Quotemaster:

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Afterthought: Not just presidents. But the criticism should, one wishes, be based on the Real World, not on the Republican one.

William James, even though he never heard of Fox News, via the Quotemaster:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Nick Cohen in the Guardian:

The puritan’s great advantage is that he knows he is right. Indeed in earlier centuries, he was convinced that God had taken the time and trouble to assure him that he was right. His great vice is his fanatical abhorrence of the smallest deviation from virtue, even when it has no ill effect.

Joan Baez, from the Quotemaster:

I’ve never had a humble opinion in my life. If you’re going to have one, why bother to be humble about it?

Beverly Beckham in the Boston Globe:

My mother continued all of her life to sign her Christmas gifts to me, “Love, Santa.’’ She believed in enchantment and strove to keep it. It’s what we all do every Christmas: We invent a better world.

Molly Ivins, from the Quotemaster:

Whatever you do, don’t give up. Because all you can do once you’ve given up is bitch. I’ve known some great bitchers in my time. With some it’s a passion, with others an art.

This says a lot about the continued viability of the Republican Party.

Steven Spielberg, via that Quotemaster:

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination – anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

Josh Marshall global warming deniers:

. . .we live in a science based world. It’s the premise on which almost everything rests. And pretty much everyone assumes that cell phones will work, bombs will go off, medical treatments will give us the best chance of survival. Only this one example is different.

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George Mason, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.