QOTD category archive

Aeschylus:

By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.

Cory Doctorow:

Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.

Van Wyck Brooks:

Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

David Hume:

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Dwight MacDonald:

Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.

John Henry Newman:

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.

Douglas Adams:

A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

Tacitus:

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

Al Franken:

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They’re about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

Hypatia:

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing.

Rachel Rowell:

Our cellphones can do everything, but they’re bad at letting us talk to each other.

Ronald Howard, in the voice of Sherlock Holmes:

Why not give them (the suffragettes–ed.) the vote. They couldn’t do any worse with it than we have.

George Washington Carver:

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.

Afterthought:

. . . but it shall wreak much destruction along the way.

Kerry Greenwood:

“Eugenics,” said Jane. “It’s interesting. Restricting the breeding of the unfit. There’s a basic flaw in their argument, I believe.” She forked in some potato salad.

“Which is?” asked Phyrne.

“Who decides who is unfit?” asked Jane.

“There you have put your finger on the nub,” Phryne informed her. “Keep reading, and I think you will find that the unfit will cover any group which the writer does not like–Catholics, Chinese, Jews, Aborigines–and any group he is afraid of–the poor, for instance, who seem set to outbreed him. The only group that will be allowed to breed freely will be–”

“Him,” said Ruth . . . .

Greenwood, Kerry, Unnatural Habits (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2013) p. 58.

Aside:

Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels are set in and around Melbourne, Australia, in the late 1920s. They are wonderfully written, well-structured, and carefully researched. They are indeed the only mystery stories I’ve come across that have bibliographies.

I recommend them highly.

Kerry Greenwood makes words dance.

The Australian television series based on them is also a great watch, if you can find it streaming somewhere.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.

Rene Descartes:

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

William Ralph Inge:

There are two kinds of fools: one says, “This is old, therefore it is good”; the other says, “This is new, therefore it is better.”

Bernard Baruch:

The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.

Philip K. Dick:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.