QOTD category archive

Charles de Gaulle:

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Tennessee Williams:

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield:

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.

Margaret Tyzack (in the voice of as Harriet Compton):

Even to this day, I fail to understand your relationship with the Good Lord. If it lives, you criticize it. If it’s dead, pray for it. Seems to be your only pleasure in life.

Daniel Handler, as Lemony Snicket:

Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.

Erik Naggum:

People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millennia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.

Thomas Paine:

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

Via Job’s Anger, which goes on to point out that the rich, though they benefit from society, did not create it and therefore by implication are morally constrained to contribute back to it.

Aside:

Such contributions, by the way, are commonly referred to as “taxes.”

(Missing link no longer missing.)

James Thurber:

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Andre Gide:

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Epicurus:

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

Rex Stout, in the voice of Nero Wolfe:

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

Stout, Rex, Champagne for One in a dual volume with Too Many Cooks (New York: Bantam, 2009), p.71

Fergus Hume:

It is Beaconsfield who says in one of his novels that no one is so interesting as when he is talking about himself. And judging Mrs. Hableton by this statement, she was an extremely fascinating individual . . . .

Alfonso Ribiero:

“Multitasking” is a fancy way of saying “Doing two things wrong instead of doing one thing right.”

America’s Funniest Home Videos, October 17, 2021

William Dean Howells:

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

J. M. Barrie:

We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.

Fergus Hume:

Every prophet convinced of the absolute truth of his mission succeeds in finding those to whom his particular view of the hereafter is acceptable beyond all others.

Fergus Hume deserves to be remembered far more than he is. He could turn a phrase.

Sam Rayburn:

You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.

Mark Holma:

Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s historic.

Oscar Wilde:

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Walter Cronkite:

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling “civilized?” And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.