User:Audacity/Quotations

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“ Disillusion is the last illusion. ”
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Λυδαcιτγ's favorite quotes.

I found many of these with the Quotations Page's Quote of the Day, and many from The Week's excellent quotation section.

Worthy of mention is Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. A few of the best entries include:

Christian
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Congratulation
The civility of envy.
Cynic
A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Marriage
The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Politics
Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
Pray
To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Woman
An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion...

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Contents Top · 0–9 · A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  1. "Let them hate so long as they fear." - Lucius Accius
  2. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." – Aristotle
  3. "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." – Aristotle
  4. "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." – Howard Aiken
  5. "Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness." – Woody Allen
  6. "You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred." – Woody Allen
  7. "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." – Mario Andretti
  8. "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine." - Anonymous
  9. "Dance like no one's watching, sing like no one's listening, live life without regrets." – Anonymous
  10. "Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." – Anonymous
  11. "Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." – Hannah Arendt
  12. "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté." – Margaret Atwood
  13. "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." – W. H. Auden
  14. "We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know." - W. H. Auden
  15. "Charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people." – Richard Avedon
  16. "They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." – Francis Bacon
  17. "If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties." – Francis Bacon
  18. "If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master." – Sir Francis Bacon
  19. "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." - Sir Francis Bacon
  20. "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." – Walter Bagehot
  21. "You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself." – Ethel Barrymore
  22. "The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a great truth may be another great truth." – Niels Bohr
  23. "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." – Napoleon Bonaparte
  24. "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." – James Bovard
  25. "You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance." - Ray Bradbury
  26. "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday." – Sir William Bragg
  27. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." – George W. Bush
  28. "The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too." – Samuel Butler
  29. "They keep talking about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore." – George Carlin
  30. "One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity." – Andrew Carnegie
  31. "To know another language is to have a second soul." – Charlemagne
  32. "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." – G. K. Chesterton
  33. "Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practive it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it." – G. K. Chesterton
  34. "Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist." - G. K. Chesterton
  35. "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." – Winston Churchill
  36. "Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all those other forms that have been tried." – Winston Churchill
  37. "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." – Winston Churchill
  38. "A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." – Sir Barnett Cocks
  39. "Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up the pillow was gone." – Tommy Cooper
  40. "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." – Robert Cringely
  41. "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." – Marie Curie
  42. "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it." – Clarence Darrow
  43. "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a well-spent life brings happy death." – Leonardo da Vinci
  44. "Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." – Evan Davis
  45. "Being a Baptist won't keep you from sinning, but it'll sure as hell keep you from enjoying it." – James Dean
  46. "In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better." – Ellen DeGeneres
  47. "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." – Senator Everett Dirksen (attributed)
  48. "Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes." – Norman Douglas
  49. "Mediocrity recognizes nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." – Arthur Conan Doyle
  50. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." – Albert Einstein
  51. "The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one." – Albert Einstein
  52. "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." – Susan Ertz
  53. "Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings." – Evan Esar
  54. "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish." – Euripides
  55. "A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." – James Feibleman
  56. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." – Benjamin Franklin
  57. "A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." – Robert Frost
  58. "Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering." – R. Buckminster Fuller
  59. "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." – Galileo Galilei
  60. "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - [[Mahatma Gandhi
  61. "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." - Jean Giraudoux
  62. "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question." - Stephen Jay Gould
  63. "The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good." – Robert Graves
  64. "When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong — or absolutely right." – Albert Guinon
  65. "It takes a big man to cry, and an even bigger man to laugh at that man." – Jack Handy
  66. "A man's silence is wonderful to listen to." - Thomas Hardy
  67. "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." – Sidney J. Harris
  68. "The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall." - Mitch Hedberg
  69. "God help the army that must fight for an idea rather than an objective." – Mark Helprin
  70. "What luck for rulers that men do not think." – Adolf Hitler
  71. "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." – Elbert Hubbard
  72. "Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune." – Kin Hubbard
  73. "Men hate those to whom they have to lie." – Victor Hugo
  74. "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!" - Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata
  75. "The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." – William James
  76. "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." – Thomas Jefferson
  77. "Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." – Samuel Johnson
  78. "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." – Samuel Johnson
  79. "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." – Carl Jung
  80. "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." – Søren Kierkegaard
  81. "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." – Martin Luther King Jr.
  82. "There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. – Alfred Korzybski
  83. "Large nations behave like gangsters, while small ones behave like prostitutes." – Stanley Kubrick
  84. "What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?" – Irv Kupcinet
  85. "What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left." – Oscar Levant
  86. "Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
  87. "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." – Abraham Lincoln
  88. "When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." – Abraham Lincoln
  89. "The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." – Andre Malraux
  90. "If it weren't for my lawyer, I'd still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging." – Joe Martin
  91. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." – Groucho Marx
  92. "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." – Margaret Mead
  93. "The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated." – H.L. Mencken
  94. "The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking." - A. A. Milne
  95. "Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was." – Margaret Mitchell
  96. "I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends." – Moby
  97. "When you make your peace with authority, you become authority." – Jim Morrison
  98. "There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward." – John Mortimer
  99. "Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles." – George Jean Nathan
  100. "I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-tellers' parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her." – New York City detective
  101. "The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends." – Friedrich Nietzsche
  102. "The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice with death." – Friedrick Nietzsche
  103. "In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning." – George Orwell
  104. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell
  105. "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." – George Orwell
  106. "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." – Dorothy Parker
  107. "Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles." – Pat Paulsen
  108. "I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter." – Steven Pearl
  109. "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." - Pablo Picasso
  110. "Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." – Ronald Reagan
  111. "You can accomplish much if you don't care who gets the credit." – Ronald Reagan
  112. "A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward." – Jean Paul Richter
  113. "Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and US Senators." – Will Rogers
  114. "Do one thing every day that scares you." – Eleanor Roosevelt
  115. "Rules are not sacred, principles are." – Franklin D. Roosevelt
  116. "When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'" – Theodore Roosevelt
  117. "Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors." – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
  118. "We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
  119. "There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey." – John Ruskin
  120. "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." – Bertrand Russell
  121. "The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection." – Bertrand Russell
  122. "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so." – Bertrand Russell
  123. "Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness." – Bertrand Russell
  124. "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." – Carl Sandburg
  125. "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." – George Santayana
  126. "Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality." – George Santayana
  127. "Music is essentially useless, as life is." – George Santayana
  128. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." - Arthur Schopenhauer
  129. "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." – Dr. Seuss
  130. "The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood." – Logan Pearsall Smith
  131. "The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions." – Susan Sontag
  132. "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." – Joseph Stalin
  133. "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." – Mark Twain
  134. "Disillusion is the last illusion." – Wallace Stevens
  135. "A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." – Thomas Szasz
  136. "The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise." - Tacitus
  137. "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." – Mother Theresa
  138. "Who is the happier man: he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?" – Hunter Thompson
  139. "Not all who wander are lost." – J. R. R. Tolkien
  140. "It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." - Arnold Toynbee
  141. "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear." – Mark Twain
  142. "In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language." – Mark Twain
  143. "Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand." – Mark Twain
  144. "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." – Mark Twain
  145. "Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." - Bill Vaughan
  146. "It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge." – Voltaire
  147. "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." – Voltaire
  148. "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." - Andy Warhol
  149. "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." – George Washington
  150. "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." – Steven Weinberg
  151. "The average American doesn't have enough intestinal fortitude to tell someone to shut up if they are talking in a movie theater." - Michael Weinstein
  152. "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." – Oscar Wilde
  153. "The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated." - Oscar Wilde
  154. "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Oscar Wilde
  155. "Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today." – Herman Wouk
  156. "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time." – EB White
  157. "Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." – Steven Wright
  158. "Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science." – Gary Zukav