Favourite quotations

Time to revive this thread.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

  • "Economic and social behaviours are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding."
  • "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."
  • "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
  • "Humility is not always compatible with truth."
  • "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
  • "One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read."
 
Ooooh, quotations! :-)

"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” (Michel de Montaigne)

"The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." (John Milton)

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." (Joseph Chilton Pearce)

"You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through." (Rosalynn Carter)

"Hatred is just a failure of the imagination." (Graham Greene)

"Confidence is the sexiest thing a woman can have." (Aimee Mullins)

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough." (Frank Crane)

"Everyone's brains boilin' in turpentine an' their teeth fallin' out all up an' down the street, that'll just suit me fine..." (Woody Guthrie - Mean Talkin' Blues) :D
 
"Kids lie all the time, but a man is only as good as his word."
 
A few quotes about religion :

  • "When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours as well."
  • "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Seneca the Younger
  • "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable." Henry Louis Mencken
  • "Faith and knowledge are related as the scales of a balance; when one goes up the other goes down. "Arthur Schopenhauer
  • "Gods don't kill people. People with gods kill people."

Some other good stuff of the kind to put on t-shirts or stickers here.
 
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Quote:Originally Posted by Maciamo
I suppose that this LP Hartley is American. This just sounds so typically American. When I go to France or Luxembourg, it doesn:t feel like a foreign country at all. Things are done pretty much the same way. I guess that Scandinavians have the same feeling among them.

I think perhaps Hartley was suggesting that a man of 40 may look back at the actions he took when 20 and concider them so strange or out of his present character its as do a complete stranger had done them but a foreign country puts it far more simply and clearly.

Oscar Wilde on his death bed - Either those curtins go or I do.

Voltaire - God is not on the side of the big Battalions but the best shots.

General George Patton - I would prefer 2 German Divisions in front of me than 1 French behind.
 
On the lighter side?

"One inch more, I would be king. One inch less, I would be Queen."
Shakespeare, or my wife.
It's a cruel world!
 
One that I'm beginning to empathise with...

"The music business is a cruel & shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves & pimps run free & good men die like dogs for no good reason............there is also a negative side."
(Hunter S Thompson)
 
“Grau, treur Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grün des Lebens goldner Baum” soit « Grise, cher ami, est toute théorie, et vert l’arbre dorée de la vie » Goethe, Faust
 
Epictetus (55-135)

  • ...you consider yourself to be only one thread of
    those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take
    care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no
    design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to
    be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest
    appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make
    myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?
 
Here are a few funny ones.

  • As she lay there dozing next to me, one voice inside my head kept saying, 'Relax..you are not the first doctor to sleep with one of his patients,' but another kept reminding me, 'Howard, you are a veterinarian.'
    Dick Wilson
  • I saw a notice which said 'Drink Canada Dry' and I've just started.
    Brendan Behan
  • (Talking about cars) Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster is a moron.
    George Carlin
 
Buddha (or from an anonymous Japanese Zen Buddhist text)

  • 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.
 
Edison faile 10,000 times before perfecting the incandescent electric light bulb. The average man would have quit at the first failure. Thats why there are so many "average" men and only one Edison.
 
I like and try to use a saying invented by a Polish writer: When you don`t know how to act, act decently.
 
From Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science :

"I can very happily view posh cosmetics - and other forms of quackery - as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don't understand science."
 
The life of an individual has meaning only insofar as it aids making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Albert Einstein
 
The best man is the one who is useful to people, the worst man is the one who harms the people. - Muhammad, PBUH(peace be upon him)
 
That what is written persists, that what is memorised is lost. - Mula Mustapha Basheski, Middle age Sarajevo chronicle writer
 
"Battles are gained or lost because the winner is stronger or the loser is weaker; that is obvious. But in the fight between reform and resistance it is not the strength of reform, but the virtue of reason and circumstance, which overcomes resistance. Reform, as distinct from revolution, is no boxing match, nor a football game, nor a contest between past and future, nor a battle between good and evil. It is the importance of circumstance that makes reform possible, and allows reformers to claim that their point of view has the inevitability of logic."

By Henry Hobhouse in Seeds of Change (p. 91).
 
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