KITSCHY QUOTES I LIKE
I won't deny that these quotes make me smile.
If you want instant gratification, go suck a lollipop.
Dr. Philip Mogul
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to
tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide
the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and
endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.
Winston Churchill
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the
subject.
Winston Churchill
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
Me figuraba el paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.
Jorge Luis Borges
Do not keep company with people who speak of careers. Not only are
such people uninteresting in themselves; they also have no interest
in anything interesting. . . . Keep company with people who are
interested in the world outside themselves. The one who never asks
you what you are working on; who never inquires as to the success of
your latest project; who never uses the word career as a noun -- he
is your friend.
Roger Rosenblatt
I tell you the more I think, the
more I feel that there is nothing
more truly artistic than to love
people.
Vincent Van Gogh
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance.
Oscar Wilde
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
If you want to know how stupid people really are, just think how
stupid the average person is and realize that half of them are stupider.
George
Carlin
Every joke is 80% true.
Amy Anderson, a friend
Your work, Sir, is both new and good, but what's new is not good and
what's good is not new.
Samuel
Johnson
"Politics" is made up of two words, "Poli", which is Greek for "many",
and "tics", which are blood sucking insects.
Gore
Vidal
A hungry man is not a free man
Adlai Stevenson
"When a man goes on a date he wonders if he is going to get lucky.
A woman already knows."
Frederick Ryder
When all else fails, men turn to reason
Abba Eban
A revolution is not a dinner-party
Mao Zedong
"I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it
always
used to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been
shot in the past year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm
afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle
says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other.
But that was a long time ago when they had things different."
Clarisse, in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
(published
1953)
"In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the
prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy."
Ivan Illich
"These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the
unborn--they are the same people who seem not so interested in
defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is
complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's
soul--they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they
don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the opressed!
How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of
concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the
accident of conception; they condemn the poor--as if the poor can help
being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in
control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of
choice was obviously democratic--was obviously American!"
John Irving, from "The Cider House Rules"
"Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota territory,
Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little
Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his
prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got
the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they
surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the
thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered
wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt
walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing
feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful
life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that
time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina.
I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven't time to
read."
David McCullough in his essay "No Time to Read?"
"One great and growing sin of a national character is an inordinate
desire to get rich and rich in a hurry. As wealth is the only
aristocracy in America, every man seems bent on attaining to that
important distinction. The 'haste to get rich' fosters a speculative
spirit, and men rush hap-hazard into schemes for the sudden acquisition
of wealth. Bubbles are blown, consequently, all around us. The man
who amasses wealth thus suddenly rarely retains it, while his momentary
success lures thousands to the same delusive pursuits. What can be
more fatal to society than such practices?"
Scientific American, June 1850
[On the Michael Fay caning] It may seem that Singapore is a
bit behind, but, as they rear their children well, their crime rate is on
the bottom of the list. I'm glad the bum got it in the end.
Steven Morgan Friedman
It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading
causes of statistics.
Knebel's Law
I've been too fucking busy and vice versa.
Dorothy
Parker
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
Mark
Twain
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after me.
Woody
Allen
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you; no one told
when to run, you missed the starting gun.
Roger Waters, Pink Floyd, Time
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
Ralph Hodgson
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Derek Bok
Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than
you need.
Kahlil
Gibran
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without
losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New
College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing,
carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining
hall was first built. The 14th century builder had planted the
trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when
the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to
replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
Danny Hillis, writing in Wired, summarizing
Stewart Brand
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only
thing.
Albert Schweitzer
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis
Carroll, the Jabberwocky
'It has always seemed strange to me,' said Doc. 'The things we admire in
men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and
feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits
which we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism,
and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the
quality of the first they love the produce of the second.'
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart;
an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head.
David Lloyd George
or Winston Churchill
(I've seen it attributed to both)
It's all trivial - your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron.
Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's the wanting to
know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the
door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father, when she standing at the door
saw me, and thought I made as I certainly did a most awkward ridiculous
appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and part of
Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way...
Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography
Some Kahlil Gibran quotes:
-
[On buying and selling:] It is in exchanging the gifts of the
earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied. Yet unless the
exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and
others to hunger. (37)
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even
the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease
to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment. You shall be free indeed
when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a
grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise
above them naked and unbound. (47)
A divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divded
house. (64)
And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs
committed in drunkenness. But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not
its chastisement. They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as
they would the havrest of a summer. Yet if it comforts them to regret, let
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