Selected Quotes

"The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant--and let the air out of the tires. "
   --Dorothy Parker

"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment. "
   --Dorothy Parker

"They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. "
   --Dorothy Parker

"Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses. "
   --Dorothy Parker

"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. (speaking of Katharine Hepburn) "
   --Dorothy Parker

"Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramps.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live "
   --Dorothy Parker

"Education is hanging around until you‘ve caught on. "
   --Robert Frost

"All power corrupts, but we need electricity. "
   --D. W. Jones, from a button circa 1970s or 1980s

"Throughout the ages half the women have been working women. The other half have been working men… "
   --Narrator, The Greeks Had A Word For Them (aka Three Broadway Girls) -- 1932

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. "
   --John Ruskin

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. "
   --George S. Patton, 3rd Army Speech - England 31 MAY 1944 - 6th Armored Division

"Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth. "
   --Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

"As drunk as October. As sober as a day in May "
   --Dennis Hansen, 2014

"However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. "
   --George Orwell, Review of Mien Kampf, March 1st, 1940, http://genius.com/George-orwell-review-of-mein-kampf-annotated

"In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. "
   --William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

"From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a proportion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of years...that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause endued with animality...and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?...Shall we then say that the vegetable living filament was originally different from that of each tribe of animals above described? And that the productive living filament of each of those tribes was different originally from the other? Or, as the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals...shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life? "
   --Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather), Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794)

"I will be so good at the military, your head will spin. "
   --Donald Trump, Radio interview with Hugh Hewitt 20150903

" "
   --, Twitter 20150815

"If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough. "
   --Mario Andretti, race car driver

"Patience is the best remedy for every trouble. "
   --Plautus, playwright

"When you're dead you don't even know you're dead. It's only pain for others. Same thing when you are stupid. "
   --Bill Nye the Science Guy, Twitter 20150902, 6:41pm

"The unexamined life is not worth living. "
   --Socrates

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. "
   --Tennessee Williams, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire

"When you use more than three to five percent of your brain, you don't want to be on Earth. "
   --Bob Diamond, Defending Your Life (1991)

"Still don't get the Big Brain bit? "
   --Bob Diamond, Defending Your Life (1991)