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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