David Chesler's Quotations page

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Quotations I've picked up from time to time, and typically used for a while in my Usenet .signature.

I took the format for this page largely from the tables of quotations found on the Cyber Nation Victory Quotations by subject pages.

Be sure to visit The Akers Page for its Sampling of Manly Poetry.

Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor.

~ Ovid, Metam., VII, 20 ~ (We scan and approve of the better, we go for the worse)
Opening of The Stuffed Owl : An Anthology of Bad Verse edited by Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis

Tell me again why they call me governor instead of branch manager?

~ Ben Nelson ~ Governor of Nebraska, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor 10/25/95 p18

The problem isn't easy access to guns, but easy access to oxygen. Certain people shouldn't be breathing.

~ Don Feder ~ Columnist, Boston Herald, 3/30/98

Please save my rabbit from the tyranny of hierarchical money grubbing evil

From a sign in the Cambridge Food Co-op offering a free rabbit to a good home.

Credit: Man's confidence in Man

Motto of Dun & Bradstreet

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem

Motto on the Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty)
I suspect that today all the Great and General Court could think to do with a sword is to condemn it as a phallic symbol of violence.

If a tree falls in the forest, and the only one to hear it is Shroedinger's cat, does it make half a sound?

~ Me ~

Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

~ J.B.S. Haldane ~ (I used this one in my high school yearbook.)

I cannot understand the value of a system of equality which cuts down the tall trees to the level of the short ones.

~ Milton Friendman ~ (I wanted to use this one in my high school yearbook. I should have. I think this was from his Playboy interview around 1977, and it may be inexact, as I can't verify it.)

Brachiopods dominate early fauna, but clams are now so commonplace that Howard Johnson's can feed a nation with their breaded feet.

~ Stephen Jay Gould ~ (May be inexact.)

Times are hard-boiled for eggs such as we.

~ François Truffaut? ~ (I recall this as by Truffaut, director as actor, in an early 1980s film, but checking The Internet Movie Database the only film that matches my recollection is Pauline at the Beach (1983) by Eric Rohmer. In any case, I'd like to know the exact quote, which sounds much better in the original.)

Yuppies who believe class size is crucial to learning and that they can increase their children's IQ by playing Mozart in the nursery think leaving newborns with strangers for eight to 10 hours a day has no negative impact.

~ Don Feder ~ Columnist, Boston Herald, 3/8/99

They want a student body where everybody looks different, but everybody thinks alike.

~ Harvey Silverglate ~ Civil Libertarian, author, Boston Herald, 5/10/99 (quoted in Don Feder's column)

I defer to Jonathan D. Schober for quotations from the Founding Fathers and others relevant to the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Please visit that page, incorporated here by reference, and excerpts from the FrogFarm cookie file (TBD).

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