QOTD category archive

Kerry Greenwood:

If you are not scared then there is no merit to being brave.

Greenwood, Kerry, Death at Victoria Dock (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2007) p. 149

Samuel Johnson:

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

J. Maarten Troost:

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

Isaac Newton:

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

Patrick Swayze:

The way to screw up somebody’s life is to give them what they want.

Pamela Meyer:

Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes. And in Donald Trump’s case, lies.

Kerry Greenwood, in the voices of Phryne Fisher and Jillian Henderson:

Phryne: I’m shocked. Have you no regard for the truth?

Jillian: If you had entered the law, you would know that truth is a very dicey quality. “What is truth?” said Pilate, and I have always thought he must have been a solicitor.

Greenwook, Kerry, Flying Too High, in the collection Introducing the
Honourable Phryne Fisher (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2011) p. 239.

Niccolo Machiavelli:

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

J. D. Salinger:

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

Adam Smith:

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Mary Katharine Ham:

Valentine’s Day is a holiday of high emotions, mostly stress. The occasion has the unique ability to make both those who do participate in it and those who don’t feel vaguely unfulfilled.

V=Malcolm Gladwell:

The bottom line is that civil society simply cannot function without default to truth…I can’t converse with you, for instance, if I subject every statement that comes out of your mouth to critical scrutiny before I accept it as true. Conversation cannot proceed without default to truth.

We see the truth of his statement every day.

Henry Adams:

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Rex Evans, in the voice of Welsley Dean, upon the discovery of the victim in a mystery show:

I just don’t happen to agree with the theory that the sudden death of a man automatically improves his character.

Jonathan Swift:

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Robin Day:

Commerce is against morality. Morality is going to lose every time.

Andy Rooney:

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

Raphael Warnock:

When you’re accustomed to privilege, parity and equity and equality may feel like oppression.

Aside:

Methinks we are seeing evidence of his observation playing out in dis coarse discourse.

Hunter S. Thompson:

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.