— (last quote arrived January 8, 2017; next quote arriving soon)
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
— Edmund Burke
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's own ignorance."
— Confucius
"If Elizabeth Taylor is overweight I for one am at a loss to suggest what there should be less of."
— Sam Spiegel
"When you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy."
— Sir James Goldsmith
"My choices early in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."
— Harry S Truman
"If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
— Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson
"To speak of 'mere words' is much like speaking of 'mere dynamite.'"
— C. J. Ducasse
"Thinking that what is good for one kind of organization is good for another is like thinking what is good for dogs is also good for cats. Universities and businesses are different kinds of organizations."
— Robert Birnbaum
"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."
— Steven Wright
"I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong."
— Clarence Darrow
"His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case for prosecution."
— Susan J. Crawford (on the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
"There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative allowing accountability to fall by the wayside is worse."
— Desmond Tutu
"My forecast assumes that no other (big) shoes will drop. Sad to say, shoes have been dropping like rain."
— Alan S. Blinder
"It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance."
— Charles Darwin
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die."
— Anonymous
"I know I'll always feel affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll always think about them. In my life, I loved you more.
— John Lennon
"I only drink to make other people seem interesting."
— George Jean Nathan
"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them."
— Paul Valery
"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
— Paul Valery
"Listening well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well."
— John Marshall
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another."
— John Burroughs
"Man cannot live by bread alone. Every once in awhile he needs a salad."
— Woody Allen
"Eternal nothingness is fine as long as one is dressed for it."
— Woody Allen
"I do not look at the country and pray for the Senators. I look at the Senators and pray for the country."
— Edward Everett Hale
"If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough."
— Edward Everett Hale
"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due."
— W. R. Inge
"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."
— Voltaire
"Let us never negotiate out of fear; but let us never fear to negotiate."
— John F. Kennedy
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
— Hubert H. Humphrey
"To err is human. To blame someone else is politics."
— Hubert H. Humphrey
"Toleration is the best religion."
— Victor Hugo
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
— Bertrand Russel
"The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well."
— Alfred Hitchcock
"I don't know if it's good for baseball but it sure beats the hell out of roomin' with Phil Rizutto."
— Yogi Berra on the engagement of Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio
"Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
— Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
— Herbert Spencer
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices."
— Edward R. Murrow
"The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer."
— Edward R. Murrow
"There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience."
— Archibald MacLeish
"Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal."
— Anatole France
"Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest."
— Anatole France
"People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
— Abraham Lincoln
"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair."
— Arnold J. Toynbee
"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."
— Arnold J. Toynbee
"When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it."
— Alan Paton
"The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply."
— Khalil Gibran
"I wish the people who had trouble communicating would just shut up."
— Tom Lehrer
"We learn nothing by being right."
— Elizabeth Bibesco
"No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward."
— Booker T. Washington
"If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else."
— Booker T. Washington
"You have to be very fond of men . . . to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable."
— Marguerite Duras
"The best way to fill time is to waste it."
— Marguerite Duras
"A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service."
— Georges Pompidou
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
— Rene Descartes
"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."
— Moses Maimonides
"Teach your tongue to say 'I do not know,' and you shall progress."
— Moses Maimonides
"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Less is more."
— Robert Browning (adopted by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who added "More or less")
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."
— Erica Jong
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
"When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
— Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois
"An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind."
— Walter Bagehot
"The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less."
— Brendan Behan
"The thing that's important to know is that you never know."
— Diane Arbus
"The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything."
— Clarence Darrow
"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things."
— Henry Ward Beecher
"The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right."
— Henry Ward Beecher
"If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
— Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson
"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West
"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young."
— Konrad Lorenz
"If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might read, 'It seemed a good idea at the time.'"
— Dame Rebecca West
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
— Bertrand Russell
"Always do right; this will gratify some and astonish the rest."
— Mark Twain
"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."
— Dorothea Lange
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death."
— Harold Wilson
My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government."
— Edward Abbey
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
— Professor Irwin Corey
"Why do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries."
— Professor Irwin Corey
"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."
— Auguste Rodin
"The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up."
— Dorothy Day
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
— Will Durant
"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
— Dale Carnegie
"Only the mediocre are always at their best."
— Jean Giraudoux
"If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function, it must have dissent."
— Henry Steele Commager
Positive: def: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
— Ambrose Bierce
"We only think when we are confronted with problems."
— John Dewey
"Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights."
— John Wooden
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."
— John Wooden
"I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth."
— Chico Marx
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
"We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."
— John W. Gardner
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent...the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
— Louis D. Brandeis
"When you're 25, you can eat hamburgers and pizza and drink beer and stay out all night and come out the next day and drink a couple cups of coffee and just play. If I did that today, my heart would stop and I'd need a stretcher and an IV."
— Mike Piazza, 37-year-old NY Mets catcher
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's own ignorance."
— Confucius
"The superior man is distressed by his lack of ability."
— Confucius
"Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity."
— Jean de la Bruyere
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"I believe that humanity shall accept as an axiom for its conduct the principle for which I have laid down my life – the right to investigate. It is the credo of free men – this opportunity to try, this privilege to err, this courage to experiment anew. We scientists of the human spirit shall experiment, experiment, ever experiment. Through centuries of trial and error, through agonies of research... let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and governments, until we chart the one true course – until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs... And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our spheres under the great impulse of a single creation — one unity, one system, one design."
"Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities; look at the world!"
"A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble."
— Mahatma Ghandi
"We know for certain only when we know little. With knowledge, doubt increases."
— Goethe
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
— Roger Brinner
"When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind."
— Lord Kelvin
"The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages, and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write."
— H. G. Wells
"Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried."
— Edward Abbey
"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest."
— Confucius
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
— Thomas Edison
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemmingway
"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."
— Humphrey Bogart
"One of the most spectacular privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to demonstrate scandalous stupidity without ever jeopardizing their reputation"
— Eric Hoffer
"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."
— Eric Hoffer
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
— Albert Einstein
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?"
— Albert Einstein
"The scientist...will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all – that this accumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you point out this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when you call to convince him the servant prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off of them."
— Mark Twain
"The only reason psychology students don't have to do more and harder mathematics than physics students is because the mathematicians haven't yet discovered ways of dealing with problems as hard as those in psychology."
— John Kemeny
"That elusive and shifty grain of gold, the right word...A powerful agent is the right word; it lights the reader's way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well–enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when the right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn–butter that creams the sumac–berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate."
— Mark Twain
Calvin: "I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating fog! Want to see my book report?"
Hobbes (reading): "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes."
Calvin: "Academia, here I come!"
— Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)
"Plato called complacent ignorance, the cheery glow of self–esteem that burns in those who imagine that they know, the most lethal sickness of the soul. It can not be cured, for the afflicted are quite content with themselves just as they are, and seek no remedy.
— Author Unknown
"Their 'enhanced self–esteem' has blossomed into an arrogant narcissism, a perversion of self–esteem where there is no idea of what is estimable.
"Notice, for instance, that the ongoing craziness about self–esteem in the schools seems never to contemplate the obvious and unsettling question: What would we have to say of self–esteem in one who has little or no self–knowledge, and who knows no principle but emotion out of which to distinguish what is estimable from what is not?
"Yes. We take no thought at all for the obvious fact that many of the children, like many of the rest of us, are in no condition to be fit and worthy gifts to others. This is doubtless because of the deadly combination of our intoxication with self–esteem and our fearful suspicion of self–knowledge. And thus it is that we have to accept the seeming of virtue rather than virtue itself."
— Richard Mitchell (The Underground Grammarian)
"All models are wrong, some are useful."
— George Box
"What works is not always what one wishes would work; but perhaps education needs more social science and less moral philosophy."
— James Traub
"Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow."
— Anonymous
"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
— Justice John Paul Stevens (regarding the 2000 presidential election)
"To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions--that is art."
— John Dewey
"We must measure what is measurable and make measurable what cannot be measured."
— Galileo
"There are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people."
— J. K. Chesterton
"One must learn by doing the thing. For though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try."
— Sophocles
"Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality."
— E. L. Thorndike
"The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter."
— E. G. Boring
"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
— Carl Sagan
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
— John Milton
"...true merit lies not in what is sought, but in the manner of the search."
— from Hal Foster's
"No matter how cynical I become, I can't keep up."
— Lily Tomlin
"The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him."
— Voltaire
"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts)
"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
— Thomas Carlyle
"Patience is also a form of action."
— Auguste Rodin
"Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need the society of kings."
— Sadi (Persian Sufi poet)
"We can't make good news out of bad practice."
— Edward R. Murrow
"There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: 'In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.'"
— Harry S Truman
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."
— T. H. Huxley
"Art and science are two sides of the same coin. Science is a discipline pursued with passion; art is a passion pursued with discipline. At pursuing both, I've had a lot of fun."
— Dr. Arthur M. Sackler
"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin
"Those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter."
— Bernard Baruch
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
— Walt Kelly (Pogo)
"It's easier to ignore data that you have than analyze data that you don't."
— Daniel D. Blaine
"Pay attention!"
— Daniel D. Blaine