Quotes! Lots and lots of quotes! some are funny, some inspirational (to me at least). Below are quotes collected by yours truly :P.
"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
- Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), upon reading a young physicist's paper
"Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking."
-George Bernard Shaw
"We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees."
- Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks
"The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep."
- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live
"Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series."
-Mark Twain, talking about author James Fenimoore Cooper
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
- last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923)
"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy."
- Von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"
- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done."
- Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), while working, when informed that his wife is dying
"Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd."
- William Congreve (1670-1729)
"Hell is paved with good samaritans."
- William M. Holden
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
"Hell is other people."
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
- Woody Allen (1935-)
"I don't feel good."
- The last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
"Men have become the tools of their tools."
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."
- Al Capone (1899-1947)
"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."
- Thomas Jones
"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."
- Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
- Mae West (1892-1980)
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
- General George Patton (1885-1945)
"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty."
- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
- Yogi Berra
"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."
- Lucille S. Harper
"An excellent man: he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him."
-Oscar Wilde
"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)
"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
- Martin Fraquhar Tupper
"God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time."
- Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair
"Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing."
-Anthony Burgess, on Samuel Beckett
"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
- Bumper Sticker
"God, please save me from your followers!"
- Bumper Sticker
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
- Carl Sagan
"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
- Isaac Asimov
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."
- James Branch Cabell
"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them."
- Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
"He who has a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed."
- George Burns (1896-1996)
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
"He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him....I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Ernest Hemingway
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'."
- unknown
"We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction."
- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "The Prince"
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
"I worship the quicksand he walks in."
- Art Buchwald
"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy--and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
-Stephen King
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
- Irvin S. Cobb
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
- Mel Brooks
"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head."
- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
- Umberto Eco
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
-Jack Nicholson
"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"We don't know if they're hiding in caves with doors open or caves with doors closed."
-George W. Bush
"They say people fear public speaking more than they fear death. So technically, if you kill a guy who's schedualed to speak, you're doing him a favor."
-Scott Adams
"Winter related injuries occur more often in the winter."
-newswoman for WHIZ-TV, Zanesvill Ohio
Attorney: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
Witness: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.
Attorney: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
Witness: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Attorney: And Mr. Dennington was dead at the time?
Witness: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy.
Attorney: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
Witness: No.
Attorney: Did you check for blood pressure?
Witness: No.
Attorney: Did you check for breathing?
Witness: No.
Attorney: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
Witness: No.
Attorney: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
Witness: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Attorney: But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?
Witness: It is possible that he could have been alive and practising law somewhere.
-testimony from court records
Attorney: What is the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
Witness: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Attorney: And why did that upset you?
Witness: My name is Susan.
-testimony from court records
Attorney: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
-testimony from court records
Attorney: How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the collision?
-testimony from court records
Attorney: You say the stairs went down to the basement?
Witness: Yes.
Attorney: And these stairs, did they go up also?
-testimony from court records
Attorney: Did he kill you?
-testimony from court records
"I'm going through eye exercise therapy, strengthening my eyes. I'm supposed to...like, rest them."
-Martha Stewart, on why she slept through an Al Gore speech
Either that girl is flirting with me, or my paranoia is finally trying to do something positive
-Brad Yung, 1998
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
-Antoine de Saint Exupery
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
-Joe Ancis
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-Philip K Dick
"Goodbye, goodbye, I hate the word. Solitude has long since turned brown and withered, sitting bitter in my mouth and heavy in my veins."
- R. M. Grenon
"Holy Kleenex, Batman! He was right under our nose the whole time and we blew it!"
-Robin from Batman
I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.
-Douglas Adams
"I married beneath me. All women do."
- Lady Nancy Astor (1879-1964), English politician, first female member of the British Parliament
"When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes;
when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues."
- Honor� de Balzac (1799-1850), French writer
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."
- Buddha (563?-483? BC), [Siddhartha Gautama] Indian mystic, founder of Buddhism
"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away-and barefoot."
- Sarah Jackson
"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos."
- Kerry Thornley
"Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart."
- Phyllis McGinley (1905-78)
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
-Unknown
"Be kind to unkind people, they probably need it the most"
-Ashleigh Brilliant
"The walls we build around us to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy"
-Jim Rohn
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
-Joe Lewis
"You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories"
-Stainslaw J. Lec
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated"
-Ernest Hemingway
"His decision was not to abandon his principles, but rather give his life to prove a point. I an not quite as fearless about dying and will, after an untoward noise such as a car backfiring, leap directly into the arms of the person I am conversing with."
-Woody Allen, on Socrates.
"I hate people. People make me pro-nuclear"
-Margaret Smith
"You must not mind me, madam; I say strange things, but I mean no harm."
-Samuel Johnson
"Always do the right thing. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest"
-Mark Twain
"Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command
the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the
newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor
generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell
me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best
generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper."
-Robert E. Lee
"The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."
-Thomas Barrington Macaulay, on Socrates.
"You will stop at nothing to reach your goal! But only because your brakes are defective....
- A Fortune Cookie
