Miscellaneous Quotes

Our ability as humans to understand the world around us gives us an important
responsibility as stewards of the planet, and fortunately more and more people
are beginning to understand that.  I just hope we have enough time.  (Jane
Goodall)

Caligula: Rasputin!  Bring in the bucket of soapy frogs and remove his
          trousers!  ("Red Dwarf")

The headline of the _Daily News_ today reads: "BRUNETTE STABBED TO DEATH."
Underneath, in lowercase letters: "6,000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake."  I
wonder what color hair they had.  (Abbie Hoffman)

Diana: Dozens of community pop-in centers; oh god, how depressing.  I bet
       they're all run by those offensively jolly fat women with tea urns
       welded to their hips and huge slabs of homemade carrot cake that they
       shove down your throat with plungers.  ("Waiting for God")

I completely abhor the idea of people telling me they're color-blind.  I want
you to recognize that I am black and understand that because I am black I might
see things a different way.  I don't want you to give me special privileges or
give me any special stereotypes because of it, but me, my color, my background,
where I come from is a part of who I am, and trying to ignore that as a
compliment is dishonest.  (Bomani Armah)

fat woman: How dare you say that to my face!?
       Al: Well, I'd say it to your back, but my car only has half a tank of
           gas!  ("Married with Children")

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving
that you are unworthy of winning.  (Adlai Stevenson)

The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
(Jack Handey)

What is the use of philosophy, if all it does is enable you to talk... about
some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your
thinking about the important questions of everyday life?  (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Caligula: Rasputin!  Bring hither the skindiving suit with the bottom cut out,
          and unleash the rampant wildebeest!  ("Red Dwarf")

Knowledge not renewed, quickly becomes ignorance.  (Peter Drucker)

I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.  (Clarence Darrow)

 Mama: Your idea of a workout includes a man, a bed, and a cigarette
       afterwards!
Naomi: That is a total lie!  I've never smoked a cigarette in my life!
("Mama's Family")

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.  (Emily Dickinson)

The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.  (Lao Tzu)

The Inquisitor: Thomas Olwin?  Thomas Olwin, you have been found unworthy of
                having existed.
  Thomas Olwin: Is that you, Mother?  ("Red Dwarf")

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who,
reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something
of what has been passing in the world during their time.  (Harry S. Truman)

There are no dull subjects.  There are only dull writers.  (H. L. Mencken)

Journalists separate the wheat from the chaff... and then print the chaff.
(Adlai Stevenson)

Who were the beta testers for Preparations A through G?

In wildness is the preservation of the world.  (Henry David Thoreau)

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Prejudice is only cowardice in the face of complexity.  (Jay Lemke)

It would be a very good thing if every trick could receive some short and
obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular
trick, he could at once be reproved for it.  (Schopenhauer)

We have met the enemy and he is us.  ("Pogo" - Walt Kelly)

Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.  (David Gerrold)

Tom: I told you curry-flavored condoms would never catch on!  ("Waiting for
God")

man: No matter whose wife I am in prison, I'll always be your husband!
("Married with Children")

How happy are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a
hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a
hundred truths.  (Francesco Guicciardini)

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.  (A. J. Liebling)

It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble.  It's the
things we know that ain't so.  (Artemus Ward)

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.  (Ralph
Waldo Emerson)

Learn as much by writing as by reading.  (Lord Acton)

Education is not simply the world of abstract verbalized knowledge.  (Aldous
Huxley)

Many people would sooner die than think.  In fact, they do.  (Bertrand Russell)

When you say the meek will inherit the earth, do you mean "as is"?  ("Frank &
Ernest" - Bob Thaves)

 woman: Oh, what a world we live in these days.  I blame it all on convenience
        foods, how about you?
Oliver: Oh, I think it all started to go wrong with Bill Haley and the Comets.
("Oliver's Travels")

Kochanski: Have you heard of something called "tough love"?
   Kryten: Does it involve dressing up?  ("Red Dwarf")

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity
in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.  (William Blake)

Has any reader found perfect accuracy in the newspaper account of any event of
which he himself had inside knowledge?  (Edward Verrall Lucas)

There is an art to making whole lies out of half-truths.  (Christy Mathewson)

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  Citizens who think for themselves,
rather than uncritically ingesting what their leaders and others with power
tell them, are the absolutely necessary ingredient of a society that is to
remain free.  (Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender)

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.  (Oscar Wilde)

Arguments, like men, often are pretenders.  (Plato)

A deluge of words and a drop of sense.  (John Ray)

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen, philosophers, and divines.  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Good news is just life's way of keeping you off balance.

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving
that you are unworthy of winning.  (Adlai Stevenson)

If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.  (Revolution Books,
NYC, NY)

Democracy: Four wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.

Nothing's impossible for those who don't have to do it.

man 1: The Senate is a whorehouse; Congress is a whorehouse.
man 2: Not to insult whores in any way.
woman: That's "working woman."  (conversation on KPFA public radio, 94.1 FM,
California)

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.  (George
Santayana)

A woman's favorite position is C.E.O.

Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
(Richard Guindon)

An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which
under old names have become odious to the public.  (Talleyrand)

When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
(Goethe)

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.  You
know what you are doing, but nobody else does.  (Stuart Henderson Britt)

Advertising is legalized lying.  (H. G. Wells)

He who defines the terms wins the argument.  (Chinese proverb)

The service we render for others is really the rent we pay for our room on this
earth.  (Wilfred Grenfell)

Adults are kids who owe money.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not reason.  (Benjamin Franklin)

Ah, well, everyone can't go to the head of the class in this doggy dog world.
But at least we all can have self-of-steam.  (Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender)

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.  (Benjamin Disraeli)

Sample size does not overcome sample bias.

Memory says, "I did that."  Pride replies, "I could not have done that."
Eventually, memory yields.  (Nietzsche)

woman: For a man who's always getting blown up, you sure have soft skin!  ("The
Wild Wild West")

It's much easier to do and die than it is to reason why.  (H.A. Studdert
Kennedy)

Ackerman, after losing his glass eye:
     I have a date with Patricia Carding from Supplies on Saturday night!  She
     thinks my eyes are my loveliest feature.  If I go like this, I'm only half
     lovely!  ("Red Dwarf")

Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.

Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity.  (Charles A. Beardsley)

I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded.  (Bertrand Russell)

The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll
sleep at night.  (Otto von Bismarck)

Conservative, n.  A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.  (_The
Devil's Dictionary_ - Ambrose Bierce)

All that we do is touched with ocean, yet we remain on the shore of what we
know.  (Richard Wilbur)

Not to know what has happened before one was born is always to be a child.
(Cicero)

  Jack: She says I have the body of a twenty-four year old.
  Kate: A twenty-four-year-old what?
Gloria: Sofa.  ("Class Act")

[Nazi] Germany has taught me that an uncritical view of the national past
generated an equally subservient acceptance of the present.  (Hans Schmitt)

Howie: There's an old psych[ology] joke, and I just remember the punchline, but
       it goes: "Dahmer, Manson, and Ronald Reagan all came from normal
       families."  (deleted scene from "The Broken Hearts Club")

A high school teacher, after all, is a person deputized by the rest of us to
explain to the young what sort of world they are living in and to defend, if
possible, the part their elders are playing in it.  (Emile Capouya)

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.  (George Santayana)

Stop repeat offenders.  Don't re-elect them!

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and
never will be.  (Thomas Jefferson)

The point of regularly testing our background beliefs in terms of our
experiences and of what we learn from others is precisely to weed out
background beliefs that are false.  (Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender)

The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we
already know, something else which we do not know.  (Charles Sanders Pierce)

the Doctor: That's the one thing common between the most powerful and the most
            stupid: they don't alter themselves to fit the facts; they alter
            the facts to fit themselves.  ("Doctor Who")

A simple person believes every word he hears; a clever one understands the need
for proof.  (Proverbs 14:15)

There's too much youth, how about a fountain of smart?

The prejudice against careful analytic procedure is part of the human
impatience with technique which arises from the fact that men are interested in
results and would like to attain them without the painful toil which is the
essence of our moral finitude.  (Morris R. Cohen)

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of
thinking.  (Sir Joshua Reynolds)

Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears
yet a precious jewel in his head, and this is our life.  Exempt from public
haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and
good in everything.  (_As You Like It_ - Shakespeare)

  Jack: A health club?  What the hell is a health club?
Gloria: It's a symbol of Western decadence.  ("Class Act")

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but
complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written
which cannot be understood.  (Samuel Johnson)

School authorities in Green Cove Springs, Florida, have barred the 1941
children's classis, _My Friend Flicka_, from fifth- and sixth-grade optional
reading lists because parents complained that the book contains the word
"bitch" in reference to a female dog.  (item from _The Progressive_ magazine,
January 1991)

The most violent element in society is ignorance.  (Emma Goldman)

If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls
the past.  (_1984_ - George Orwell)

 Hugo: Alice, in the words of Sigourney Weaver, from the film _Aliens_...
Alice: "Get away from her, you bitch!"
 Hugo: Umm, no, it wasn't that line, it was before that...
Alice: Oh!  "You wait in the ventilation shaft while I check the corridor!"
("The Vicar of Dibley")

When American scholars talk about... Soviet texts which blatantly indoctrinate,
they are called brainwashing.  When our own texts are biased, prejudiced, one-
sided and unfair, it is called "transmitting a favorable view of our
democracy."  (S. Samuel Shermis)

       Gloria: You can't just sell human beings.
Kate's father: What about Australians?  ("Class Act")

Thoughtfully written analysis is out, "live pops" are in...  Hire lookers, not
writers.  Do powder-puff, not probing, interviews.  Stay away from
controversial subjects.  Kiss ass, move with the mass, and for heaven and the
ratings' sake don't make anybody mad...  Make nice, not news.  (Dan Rather)

It was a pretty good adjective.  Then it became a noun.  Any time an adjective
becomes a noun, it's in trouble.  (Eugene McCarthy, on the term "liberal")

Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence.  ("Time Bandits")

You can lead a man up to the university, but you can't make him think.  (Finley
Peter Dunne)

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know,
that is true knowledge.  (Henry David Thoreau)

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.  (James Thurber)

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.  (Mark Twain)

Dance like nobody's watching; love like it's never going to hurt.

Think with your head, not your guts.

Populus vult decipi.  (The people want to be deceived.)

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Man is a social animal; only in the herd is he happy.  It is all one to him
whether it is the profoundest nonsense or the greatest villainy - he feels
completely at ease with it - so long as it is the view of the herd, and he is
able to join the herd.  (Soren Kierkegaard)

So you're a feminist?  Isn't that cute!

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
(Abraham Lincoln)

Work is for people who don't know how to fish.

Every dogma has its day.  (Abraham Rotstein)

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.  (Montaigne)

How strange it is to see with how much passion/people see things only in their
own fashion.  (Moliere)

I was very shocked when my son told me that his boyfriend was a homosexual.
("Frye and Laurie")

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but
to weigh and consider.  (Francis Bacon)

Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with
him like flies on a summer day.  (Bertrand Russell)

Orthodontics and the hair dryer have become vital to the achievement of
political power.  (Len Deighton)

Sometimes I wake up grumpy; other times I let her sleep.

March isn't the only thing that's in like a lion, out like a lamb.

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available
to everybody and entirely governed by what people want.  The most terrifying
thing is what people do want.  (Clive Barker)

 Bob: Kiri has said to me before that: "I wish I was a guy, then I could get
      men."  If that was all it took...
Zurd: Yes, being a guy makes you an automatic guy-magnet...
 Bob: Damn right it does, I have three crawling in through my windows right
      as we speak, and another one is banging on the heater vent in the wall
      begging me to let him in.
Zurd: But we all know that Bob has a little something called "standards," and
      will shoo those men away, right?
 Bob: Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!  The key word being "little."
Zurd: ... Bob?
 Bob: Yeah?
Zurd: Say yes.  Even if it's a lie...
 Bob: "Yes."
Zurd: Thank you, Bob.  (Zurd [Alainna Wrigley] and Bob [James Han])