QOTD category archive

Theodore Roosevelt:

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Alison Golden and Grace Dagnall, in the thoughts of Inspector Graham as he takes notes using (gasp!) a notepad:

It was easy to appear a dinosaur these days if you hadn’t turned over the running of your life . . . to a couple of gadgets.

Golden, Alison and Dagnall, Grace, The Case of the Screaming Beauty in
The Inspector Graham Mysteries 1-4 (San Carlos: Mesa Verde, 2915) p.46.

Brian France:

Rumors are always interesting, but they’re seldom right.

Shirley Monticue, as Girl Beatnik:

Do you believe we should give people the vote before educating them to use it wisely?

I’m so old, I can remember when public schools taught civics (at my school, the course was called “Government,” but rose by any other name etc.).

Methinks not doing so has not turned out very well.

Walter Lippmann:

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

Lawrence J. Peter:

A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.

Rosa Parks:

As far back as I can remember, I knew there was something wrong with our way of life when people could be mistreated because of the color of their skin.

Julius Caesar:

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Irene Ware, in the voice of Jane Maxwell:

I’m afraid I know my luck. It’s always pretty bad.

Etan Cohen:

I never expected Idiocracy to become a documentary.

Cyril Luckham, in the voice of Lord Galloway:

I suppose the world would be a better place if people got ahead by merit alone, but unfortunately they don’t.

H. P. Lovecraft:

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Rob Estes, in the voice of Sgt. Chris Lorenzo:

Free advice is worth what you pay for it.

Walter Cronkite:

We all have our likes and our dislikes. But… when we’re doing news – when we’re doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we’re doing the daily news, covering politics – it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.

Juvenal:

No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.

Dwight Eisenhower:

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

G. K. Chesterton:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Via Juanita Jean.

Leonard Goldberg, in the voice of Joanna Blalock:

Greed has no end. It is like a bottomless well that cannot be filled. And at times the wealthiest are the worst offenders.

Goldberg, Leonard, The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Minotaur, 2017) p. 262