QOTD category archive

Dick Cavett:

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

Keri Smith:

In order to be who you are as a human being, you need to be willing to upset people.

Kenneth L. Pike:

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

Chris Hedges:

The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.

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E. B. White:

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

Abba Eban:

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Paul Theroux:

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Lionel Shriver:

Reality doesn’t have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.

Thomas Sowell:

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Kerry Greenwood:

Mrs. West said to Phyrne, “I’ve decided on my costume, Miss Fisher. . . . Circe. She was a sorceress in the old days, that’s what Jack said.”

“She turned men into pigs,” said Phyrne. “Not a long journey in some cases.”

Greenwood, Kerry, Death by Water (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2010), p. 159.

Henry David Thoreau:

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Patrick Stewart, in the voice of Captain Jean-Luc Picard:

To instantly tranform a society with new technology would be harmful . . . destructive.

Afterthought:

I suspect that, when Picard uttered those words, he did not expect them to become manifest on Earth four centuries before he said them.

Emile Borel:

Whatever the progress of human knowledge, there will always be room for ignorance, hence for chance and probability.

Robert Bloch:

The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone else he can blame it on.

Charles A. Reich:

The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

Alan Turing:

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Paul Samuelson:

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

Kerry Greenwood:

“People,” sighed Jane. “I’ll never understand them.”

“They are not logical,” agreed Phryne.

Greenwood, Kerry, Murder and Mendelssohn (Scottscale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2014), p. 120

Kerry Greenwood:

The coroner thought that evil people had organic brain damage or some other physical disease. Phryne did not think so, and neither did Robinson. Some coots were just naturally evil . . . .

Greenwood, Kerry, Murder in the Dark (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2009), p. 239.

James Whistler:

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.