QOTD category archive

Alexander Morton, in the voice of Golly Mackenzie, as he removes an apple from the exhaust pipe of a car he just beat in a grudge race:

Age and treachery will always triumph over youth and horsepower.

If you can find Monarch of the Glen on some streaming service somewhere, it’s worth a watch.

Theodore Roosevelt:

To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.

John Quayle, in the voice of Jolyon:

It has been a guiding principle in my life always to put pleasure before business.

Alison Golden and Grace Dagnall:

Anger is poisonous to reason, and prejudice obscures facts better than a think winter fog.

Golden, Alison and Dagnall, Grace, The Case of Sampson’s Leap, (San Carlos: Mesa Verde, 2021) p. 310

Alfred Adler:

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Joyce Carol Oates:

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Buzz Burbank:

A new poll just out shows that most Americans think it’s too early to be talking about polls.

Yeah, there is no such poll. But methinks he’s right.

We get too many polls, not enough truth.

Vanna Bonta:

Truth may sometimes hurt, but delusion harms.

Richard Briers, in the voice of Hector MacDonald, as he pours a drink:

This is a problem that requires two minds and a single malt.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Gerardus Mercator:

When I saw that Moses’ version of the Genesis of the world did not fit sufficiently in many ways with Aristotle and the rest of the philosophers, I began to have doubts about the truth of all philosophers and started to investigate the secrets of nature.

Bob Keeshan:

One of the big secrets of finding time is not to watch television.

Alexander Morton, in the voice of Golly Mackenzie:

You come into this life naked, wet, and cold. Then things really get bad.

Hypatia:

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Holbrook Jackson:

Suffer fools gladly; they may be right.

Barbara Tuchman:

History is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Marshall Thompson, in the voice of Arthur Poe:

Most people can resist anything except temptation.

Gene Roddenberry:

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Stephen Fry:

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

Alison Golden, in the voice of Inspector Graham as he takes notes with a pencil and notepad instead of a tablet:

It was easy to appear a dinosaur these days if you hadn’t handed over the running of your life–and the basic duties of your profession–to a couple of gadgets.

Golden, Alison, The Case of the Screaming Beauty, in The Inspector Graham
Mysteries Books 1-4 (San Carlos, CA: Mesa Verde Publishing) p.46.