Quote-o-rama:
The Thirteenth Miscellaneous File
"Saying 'the movie needed more explosions' is my polite way to suggest that the film was a romantic comedy, by the way!" -Dinosaur Comics, qwantz.com "A nation's success or failure in achieving democracy is judged in part by how well it responds to those at the bottom and the margins of the social order... The very problems that democratic change brings - social tension, heightened expectations, political unrest - are also strengths. Discord is a sign of progress afoot; unease is an indication that a society has let go of what it knows and is working out something better and new." -Sandra Day O'Connor "There is a place between irony and sincerity. I go there when I sleep." -CatAndGirl.com "If this storyline were any more boring, just reading it would cause you to go back in time." -JoshReads.com "You know the tendency of some shows to have the same character played by a different actor? That's kind of what's happened to this show lately, except they have the same actors playing different characters and they forgot to tell the audience." -TelevisionWithoutPity.com "When it comes to the media, there's no such thing as 'mere sensationalism.'" -BAGnewsNotes.com "What part of 'Michael Bay' attracts one to a project, anyway? Oh, yes. The part with all the zeroes behind it." -Fametracker.com "Only a mediocre person is always at his best." -W. Somerset Maugham "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 2003 "More than fifteen years later, we still have the 21 Jump Street soundtrack on vinyl, and Johnny Depp has distinguished himself like no other '80s heartthrob. Can you imagine Kirk Cameron as Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Donnie Brasco, Hunter Thompson, Captain Jack Sparrow, or Ichabod Crane? (If you can, get out!)" -Fametracker.com "A concept is stronger than a fact." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." -J. Robert Oppenheimer "Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual." -Margaret Fuller "Has anybody else had to watch their husband die on television over and over? I know that it's public and I know that it's national, but it's so private for me." -Evelyn Husband, widow of Rick Husband, who died on the space shuttle Columbia "President Bush said he would be willing to consider people who were not judges or lawyers for the Supreme Court opening. Yeah, making the supreme laws of the land -- what kind of job is that for professionals?" -Jay Leno "Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted." -Aldous Huxley "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -Charles Babbage "I don't believe in an interventionist God." -Nick Cave "The real drawback to 'the simple life' is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time." -Katharine Fullerton Gerould "If we knew where opinion ended and fact began, we should have discovered, I suppose, the absolute." -Alec Waugh "The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf." -Frank Rich, NYTimes.com "The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline." -Bum Phillips "Nothing is really real unless it happens on television." -Daniel J. Boorstin "The reality is that we are hated not because of our democracy, freedoms, and generous social security system; rather, we are hated because of our involvement in foreign conflicts and quarrels that were never our concern." -Amir Butler "If you don't have enemies, you don't have character." -Paul Newman "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it." -Albert Einstein "These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed ... Great necessities call out great virtues." -Abigail Adams "Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak." -Robert G. Ingersoll "It is true that many Americans find the Commandments in accord with their personal beliefs. But we do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment." -Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 2005 "To understand is hard. Once one understands, action is easy." -Sun Yat-sen "Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho? We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power - America in an Arab land - with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous. We don't gain the size of our victory by how many innocent kids running away - even though they're bad guys - that we can slaughter... We're American soldiers; we don't do business that way." -President George H. W. Bush, 1987 "The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master." -James Fenimore Cooper "We have a finite number of troops. But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country." -Major Chris Kennedy, Tal Ifar, Iraq, 2005 "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." -Arthur Conan Doyle "For decades, the establishment media were like a walled village, largely insulated from the outside world. But technology has produced so many cracks in the wall that previously ignored stories can seep in - sometimes in a trickle, sometimes a flood - when partisans and pressure groups make enough waves." -Howard Kurtz, WashingtonPost.com "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." -Revelations 22:13 "White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said it would be wrong to create an artificial time table for getting out of Iraq. You think that's true? We went in for artificial reasons, using artificial intelligence - why not have an artificial time table to get out?" -Jay Leno "It is... a peculiarly noble work rescuing from oblivion those who deserve immortality," -Pliny the Younger "The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn't expect one." -E.J. Dionne Jr., WashingtonPost.com "There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power." -J. William Fulbright "It's hard to win votes for massive reform unless there is a crisis." -George W. Bush, 1999 "I think the pronouncement that 'All women are evil' is on the first page of the 'How To Run Like Hell' handbook. Good lord." -Carolyn Hax "I just don't quite get what people see in so many of the big blockbuster movies. They seem so simplistic, they seem so dumbed-down, that I can't see why I would want to pay nine bucks or whatever it is now for going to see that." -Christian Bale "Actually, the reason most journalists are liberal - conservatives HATE this position - is that journalists tend to be better informed about public issues than most people." -Gene Weingarten "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." -St. Teresa of Avila "President Bush criticized the election process in Iran. He said there are groups there who try and suppress the vote, power there is in the hands of the very few, and the whole thing is dominated by religion. Hey, that is our system." -Jay Leno "Going out with you would be like dating a biker, except I get to make out with the motorcycle." -DieselSweeties.com "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." -Pablo Picasso "I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to." -Willard Gaylin "No individual gets up and says, I'm going to take this because I want it. He'd say, I'm going to take it because it really belongs to me and it would be better for everyone if I had it. It's true of children fighting over toys. And it's true of governments going to war. Nobody is ever involved in an aggressive war; it's always a defensive war - on both sides." -Noam Chomsky "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." -President George H. W. Bush, 1987 "I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms." -Giacomo Casanova "I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool." -Katharine Whitehorn "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -George Orwell "It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument." -William Gibbs McAdoo "Everything you do is part of a plane plummeting towards our pitiful, dying earth. But your art, what you create is stepping onto the burning wing and forgetting silly things like life and death for a moment. Just to enjoy for one second a glimpse of beauty before you are reduced to ashes." -Marilyn Manson "The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you." -Viscountess Astor "In bridge clubs and in councils of state, the passions are the same." -Mason Cooley "It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus." -Bob Geldof, 2005 "The slight that can be conveyed in a glance, in a gracious smile, in a wave of the hand, is often the ne plus ultra of art. What insult is so keen or so keenly felt, as the polite insult which it is impossible to resent?" -Julia Kavanagh "...A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend." -J. William Fulbright "I'm conservative, but I'm not a nut about it." -President George H. W. Bush, 1987 "The only reason one will respect you as a journalist is because of your integrity. Your integrity is based on your credibility. Your credibility comes from your truthfulness. All these come from you submitting yourself as a servant of the truth, a servant of issues." -Shaka Ssali "Patience! Patience! Patience is the invention of dullards and sluggards. In a well-regulated world there should be no need of such a thing as patience." -Grace King "This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home... It's the idea that we all have value, you and me..." -Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain "The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head." -Kurt Cobain "Consider God's handiwork; who can straighten what He hath made crooked?" -Ecclesiastes 7:13 "I do believe one ought to face facts. If you don't they get behind you and may become terrors, nightmares, giants, horrors. As long as one faces them one is top dog." -Katherine Mansfield "...The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about." -Noam Chomsky "I'm an existentialist--freedom and passion are the most important things to me. I was horribly disappointed when I learned that Sartre was a Communist." -Shintaro Ishihara "Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful." -Chandler Burr "The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon 'moderation' in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." -President Dwight Eisenhower, 8 Nov 1954 "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts." -President Ronald Reagan "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." -Jerome K. Jerome "History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable." -Henry Kissinger "Life is a tragedy full of joy." -Bernard Malamud "In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existance. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized." -Theodor Adorno "Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." -Sir Laurens van der Post "For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone." -E.M. Forster "Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything." -Henry Ward Beecher "A President is neither prince nor pope, and I don't seek a window on men's souls. In fact, I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easy-goingness about each other's attitudes and way of life." -President George H. W. Bush, Inaugural Address, 1989 "The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist." -Novalis "Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?" -Clyde Kluckhohn "We're so trendy that we can't even escape ourselves." -Kurt Cobain "America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese." -David Riesman "Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken." -Eric Hoffer "It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation." -Helen Maria Hunt Jackson "My fellow Americans, we will no longer be oppressed by the fascism of Christianity, and we will no longer be oppressed by the fascism of beauty. 'Cause I see you all sitting out there trying your hardest not to be ugly... trying your hardest not to fit in... trying your hardest to earn your way into heaven... but let me ask you - do you wanna be in a place that's filled with a bunch of assholes?!" -Marilyn Manson, 1997 MTV Video Music Awards "Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them." -Edward R. Murrow "The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind." -Mike Godwin "Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock." -Kurt Cobain "I am two lesbians in a man's body." -Eddie Izzard "This is absolutely true. During the scare Vice President Cheney was inside working while President Bush was outside riding his bicycle. So it was a typical day at the White House. Remember the last time this kind of thing happened, he was reading a children's book. This time he was riding a bicycle. How old his he - 12?... You laugh but as soon as they gave the all-clear he went into the kitchen to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." -Jay Leno "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli." -President George H. W. Bush "I enjoy constructive criticism; what's less fun is being denounced (by the left or the right) by people who are angry that you haven't adopted their partisan view of whatever the story is... Look, I think it's great that anyone in America can go online and post opinions about the media, which have been shielded from sustained criticism for too long. I think readers are smart enough to figure out when the criticism has merit or when it's partisan, personal or just plain nasty. The bloggers and commentators who build a reputation for incisive criticism are the ones who will thrive in the long run." -Howard Kurtz, WashingtonPost.com "ABC has declined to air an anti-war political advertisement produced by an online contest winner, stating that they have a policy against showing ads of that nature. Apparently, however, ABC has no problems with ads that deliver the message 'Women are sluts for beer.'" -Tina Fey "...And if there's a more choke-, spank-, fist-, and buttfuck-positive advice columnist out there, I'd like to meet, choke, spank, fist, and fuck him." -Dan Savage "If there was a rock star 101 course, I'd really have liked to take it. It might have helped me." -Kurt Cobain "Blanket reminder on mental health: Leaving a broken leg untreated doesn't make you brave, it makes you unlikely to walk well again, if at all. So if there's something wrong with your brain chemistry or learned behavior, leaving it untreated doesn't make you brave, it makes you unlikely to feel good again." -Carolyn Hax, WashingtonPost.com "Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." -Dr. Thomas F. Jones Jr. "The majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." -Larry Flynt "History would be an excellent thing if only it were true." -Leo Tolstoy "Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains - except kill it." -Erich Fromm "Many people think of tequila only as the quickest route from Soberville to Drunktown." -WashingtonPost.com "The world does not require so much to be informed as reminded." -Hannah More "There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule." -Samuel Butler "Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future." -Ayn Rand "I'm not against God. I'm against the misuse of God." -Marilyn Manson "You can never be too paranoid. If they lock you up for it, it just means that you weren't paranoid enough to keep it sufficiently well hidden." -Par Leijonhufvud "The contradictions of the past notwithstanding, Frist and his colleagues should let the filibuster stand, not merely because they will be the opposition again one day and may need it, but in recognition of the minority's legitimate role in democratic decision-making. In using this tool to resist an increasingly tyrannical majority, Democrats are doing nothing more than what Republicans have done themselves, and nothing less than the founders envisioned." -Jacob Weisberg, slate.msn.com "It is better to be hated for what one is, then to be loved for what one is not." -Andrew Gide "The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government." -Jim Hightower "Love your enemies just in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards." -Pete W. De Bonte "Even as the fingers of the two hands are equal, so are human beings equal to one another. No one has any right, nor any preference to claim over another. You are brothers." -The Final Sermon of Mohammad "Stocks plunged again Friday, suffering their worst day since 2005 and third-straight triple-digit loss for the Dow Jones Industrial average. On the bright side, your Social Security money isn't in there yet." -Amy Poehler "No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation." -Fran Lebowitz "Tom DeLay is in a little bit of trouble. He says he didn't know that lobbying groups were illegally funding the trips he took all over the world. Don't you love this? When ever these guys are running for office they always tell us how smart they are, how knowledgeable they are, how they know what's going on. As soon as they get caught doing something wrong 'I'm an idiot. I didn't know what was going on.'" -Jay Leno "My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years." -Kurt Cobain "It's a safe bet that neither al-Sadr nor his Iraqi supporters considers him particularly 'radical.' And, if you stop to think about it, there's nothing inherently extreme about wanting foreign troops to leave your country. Radical is a highly subjective word that gets thrown around without much reflection. What's more radical, invading another nation without a good excuse or trying to stop someone from doing so?" -Ted Rall "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -Thomas Jefferson "If your guitar is out of tune, sing out of tune along with it." -Kurt Cobain "So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies." -John Mason Brown "Of course, being old is its own form of invisibility: College students see only other college students, in the same way that kids see only other kids. I was barely there." -Joel Achenbach, WashingtonPost.com "If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not to me." -Larry Flynt "If you ever wondered where really weird cartoons come from, this is one answer. They don't really 'come from' anywhere. You just have to ride the ride and be as open to stupidity as you can be." -rstevens, dieselsweeties.com "We think in generalities, but we live in detail." -Alfred North Whitehead "Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you." -Fran Lebowitz "We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves." -Henri Frederic Amiel "To be really cosmopolitan, a man must be at home even in his own country." -Thomas Wentworth Higginson "The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an 'awesome God' in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we've got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America." -Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, 2004 "We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow." -Fulton Oursler "When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded." _Nineteen Eighty-Four_, by George Orwell "Either way, it's clear that one principle, so firmly upheld by DeMille, has remained inviolate no matter what the courts have to say: American moguls, snake-oil salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or power will stop at little if they feel it is in their interests to exploit God to achieve those ends." -Frank Rich, NYTimes.com "The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity." -Helen Rowland "I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker." -Stanley Kubrick "Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves." -Henry Miller "I advocate the theory of the permanent revolution. You must not think that this is Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution. In making revolution, one must strike while the iron is hot, one revolution following another; the revolution must advance without interruption..." -Mao Tse-Tung, 1958 "Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece." -Nadia Boulanger "And last week I said 'taxonomy.' Nothing gets chicks hot like a great vocabulary." -Richard Leiby, WashingtonPost.com LiveOnline "But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worst part of oneself." -Patrick McGoohan "The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." -William Osler "First, the caveat: we mean no disrespect in pairing a celebrity in pitched battle with a baked good (or a garden tool, or a piece of furniture), in which the loser is banished to obsolescence and obscurity." -Fametracker.com "You know, one thing that doesn't change is the sound of kids getting out of school. Record that in 1921, record that now, it's the same sound." -Tom Waits "There is hope, but not for us." -Franz Kafka "Now the very symbols of the technological superiority of our age, from the cell phone to the internet to jet airliners, have been transformed into weapons in the hands of those who are the declared enemies of our way of life. They allow stateless actors the to reach out from the shadows, from weak and failed states, to attack us here at home. Those states can destabilize their neighbors and whole regions, creating humanitarian crises as severe as any natural disaster." -Senator Joe Biden, 2004 "Even as we're constantly told we're in a war for 'freedom' abroad, freedom in our culture at home has been under attack ever since." -Frank Rich, NYTimes.com "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -Susan Ertz "I try very hard to be a responsible citizen and as a gay man I try very hard to keep track of the marriages I have destroyed, and there really aren't that many. I may have some secret admirers out there and I may have wreaked more havoc than I realize, but they haven't called." -Representative Barney Frank "I took an online class once, it's called google." -Jack E. "Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community." -Anthony J. D'Angelo "According to the New York Times, a commission due to report to President Bush this month will claim that our intelligence regarding Iran's weapon program is inadequate. Today Bush said 'Hey, good enough for me. Let's invade." -Jay Leno "This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave." -Elmer Davis "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society." -Doris Lessing, _The Golden Notebook_ "Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well." -Josh Billings "[Television is] like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house." -Alfred Hitchcock "Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you." -William Arthur Ward [From a movie review.] "This is the point at which millions of DVD renters will someday push Eject, and I hope they all get the refunds they deserve." _Washington City Paper_ "The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." -James Baldwin "All of the great works of art, it seems to me, are the ones that have a total disregard for anything else; just a total egotistical self-indulgence." -Nick Cave "But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated." -Ernest Hemingway "To force opinion is like pushing the magnetized needle round by brute strength until it points to where we wish the North Star stood, rather than to where it really is." -Dorothy Canfield "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." -Rudyard Kipling "There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist." -Ayn Rand "In Germany, President Bush this week, you know he was there, just got back. Thousands of Germans took to the streets to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Let me tell you something, that's when you know you've accomplished something -- when Germans think you're invading too much." -Jay Leno "Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgement." -Duc De La Rochefoucauld "The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both." -James A. Michener "If people behaved in the way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets." -Tennessee Williams "Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was." -Dag Hammarskjold "Remember, every penny of profit goes to help pay for my bandwidth costs, and, if I cover that, to help pay for my sweet, sweet booze." -JoshReads.com "We like celebrities. But we don't like them that much." -Fametracker.com "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else. That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies." -President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 2005 "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." -T. E. Lawrence "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer and wish we didn't." -Erica Mann Jong "Congress may pass a law that would result in TV networks that broadcast indecency being even stiffly penalized. In fact, it is going to cost us 500 more bucks because I said stiffly penalized." -Craig Ferguson "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." -Victor Hugo "Jeff Gannon ... He is a White House correspondent who has been lobbing softball questions at the president and his press secretary, turns out he is actually a paid escort for wealthy homosexuals... He actually had two jobs -- one obviously was sleazy and shameful and the other was a gay male prostitute... I think I know what Bush meant now when he said he has a mandate." -Bill Maher "The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will." -Vince Lombardi "There was a time when the music was a movement, and it seemed there was room for everybody. Rap was the ultimate reality show, with lyricists spitting rhymes about their lives, real lives. If you had a story, and you could tell it well, then people wanted to listen. Especially if you were telling your story over some banging beats. You could be an intellectual, along the lines of KRS-One or Public Enemy. You could be political like Sister Souljah. You could be silly, like the Fresh Prince or Slick Rick. But then gangstas replaced the intellectuals, thugs replaced the activists, and the culture became a commodity." -Teresa Wiltz, WashingtonPost.com "So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs." -Elbert Hubbard "So, Moulin Rouge! and Chicago yes, Phantom of the Opera no. So, pairing a legendarily hacky director with a maudlin Broadway musical doesn't lead to Oscar glory. So, Christopher Columbus, good luck with Rent." -Fametracker.com "The constitution is the most dangerous document in the country and the most important one affecting the future of the country. It should be written extremely carefully." -Alaadeen Muhammad Al-Hakim, Shiite spokesman, Iraq "As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly." -Lew Wallace "These two incidents remind me that I am, for better or worse, an oracle on all things life-related. People expect me to advise them about life itself. I don't know a darn thing about relationships or healthy lifestyles or communication strategies, but I can tell people how likely it is that micro-organisms flourish in the cold, dark subsurface ocean of the icy Jovian moon Europa. I can't tell you how many times I've answered the phone at three in the morning and been forced to explain the difference between RNA and DNA." -Joel Achenbach, WashingtonPost.com "It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same." -Isadora Duncan "With lots and lots of words, a cast of annoying and largely indistinguishable characters, and an unrelentingly negative attitude, _Zippy_ is the _Cathy_ of the surrealist/postmodern set." -JoshReads.com "My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it." -Charles Lamb "[_Elektra_'s] most striking image is that of star Jennifer Garner squeezed into a red bustier and high-heeled combat boots, looking like the world's deadliest hooker. And though she's proven herself a remarkably adaptive actress elsewhere, Garner looks uneasy in the part, in or out of her superheroine costume. The role needs a steely, inhuman reserve, and Garner's innate likeability works against her. Even when she's taking aim with a bow and arrow, she looks like she might be thinking about kittens." -TheOnionAVClub.com "Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor." -Queen Elizabeth I "If your nice friend has a nice family, and I'm betting from the kindness of her gesture that she does, they'll all know what you're going through and understand completely when you go through random slumps of depression and crying. You're -supposed- to go through random slumps of depression and crying. Please don't regard your humanity as an embarrassment." -Carolyn Hax, WashingtonPost.com LiveOnline "I'm not young enough to know everything." -Sir James Matthew "I'm looking more and more like the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy everyday." -Kevin Smith, Newsarama interview "The masses gladly take revenge for the honors they render us." -Napoleon Bonaparte "We're living in the era of the Permanent Campaign. The old notion that the parties would beat each other's brains in during the election and then try to do the people's business, at least in odd-numbered years, is now considered quaint. The brain-bashing, and fundraising based on brain-bashing, now takes place all year, every year." -Howard Kurtz, WashingtonPost.com
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
Back to Quote-O-Rama HQ
Back to my home page