QOTD category archive

Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time:

It is an odd think, but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset.

Aside:

I wonder if I somehow inadvertently got some kind of bootleg copy. Per the cover, it was printed in Columbia, SC, on 2020-11-08, but it bears no publishers imprint and the pages are numbers, nor are there any chapter headings.

The quotation, in any event, rings true.

James Randi:

Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

Peter Dicken:

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

Tom Baker, in the voice of Donald MacDonald, and Martin Compston, in the voice of Ewan Brodie:

Donald: Sentimentality is the curse of the working classes.

Ewan: No, Don. The curse of the working classes is the upper classes.

Aside:

One more time, if you can find Monarch of the Glen, watch it (I know it is currently on Tubitv.com). It is a superb series.

Henry Martyn Robert:

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

Anne Rice:

We’re frightened of what makes us different.

Jenifer Pahlka:

If you don’t tolerate any risk, you can never innovate.

René Guénon:

A philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others.

Elie Wiesel:

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.

Robert Englund:

Halloween starts earlier and earlier, just like Christmas.

Rae Hendrie. in the voice of Jess McCrae:

Some knots you can’t untie.

H. G. Wells:

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Stanley Kubrick:

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.

Charles Kettering:

Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.

Joseph Joubert:

It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.

Buzz Burbank:

Any party that cannot govern itself is incapable of governing us.

Susan Hampshire, in the voice of Molly MacDonald:

Somehow, when things change, it’s easier to just put your head in the sand and leave it there.

Afterthought:

It seems to that there’s quite a bit of that going on these days.

Josephine Tey:

The problem with you, dear, as that you think of an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, when he is probably a scruffy little man in a bowler hat.

Tey, Josephine (Elizabeth MacKintosh), The Franchise Affair (New York: Scribner, 2020), p. 251

Patrick Henry:

The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American.

Beilby Porteus:

One murder made a villain, millions a hero.