Quotations

1. Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. — David Lloyd George (1863-1945)

2. Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. — Thomas Szasz (1920- )

3. Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. — Jules Renard (1864-1910)

4. We never really grow up; we only learn how to act in public. — Bryan White (1974- )

5. Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it. — Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

6. I accept the whole damn thing. It is neither all beautiful nor all terrible, but a wash of multitudinous despairs and exhilarations about which we know nothing. Our history is so small, our experience so limited, our science so inadequate, our theologies so crammed in mere matchboxes, that we know we stand on the outer edge of a beginning and our greatest history lies before us, frightening and lovely, much darkness and much light. — Ray Bradbury (1920- )

7. Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias, "social justice". — Thomas Sowell (1930- )

8. American culture is, one way or another, business culture, and our business is service. Once we were a great industrial nation. Now we are a service economy. Which means we are forced to interact with each other, every day, in person and by phone and email. And it's making us all a little mad. — Peggy Noonan (1950- ) in "We Pay Them to Be Rude to Us" in the WSJ.com Opinion Journal

9. While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there's a huge difference between the two. — Todd Gilman in "Not Enough Time in the Library" in The Chronicle of Higher Education

10. We cannot undo the past,but we are bound to pass it in review in order to draw from it such lessons as may be applicable to the future. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

11. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

12. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

13. It is better to be both right and consistent. But if you have to choose—you must choose to be right. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

14. To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

15. Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. — Donna Westmoreland Oneal (1949- )

16. The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy. — Florence Scovel Shinn (1871-1940)

17. How often in life must one be content with what one can get! — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

18. It is wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

19. Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. — Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

20. Money often costs too much. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

21. The best evidence of the fairness of any settlement is the fact that it fully satisfies neither party. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

22. Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

23. Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. — John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

24. These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. — Gilbert Highet (1906-1978)

25. All social reform... which is not founded upon a stable medium of internal exchange becomes a swindle and a fraud. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

26. It is pretty tough to reshape human society in an after-dinner speech. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

27. Enough is as good as a feast. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

28. Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. — Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

29. You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips. — Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)

30. You may try to destroy wealth, and find that all you have done is to increase poverty. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

31. Fearthought is futile worrying over what cannot be averted or will probably never happen. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

32. You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else. — Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

33. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. — Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

34. Every generation of faculty seems to have to rediscover what really works in pedagogy. — Larry G. Richards (1939- )

35. Because we don't understand the brain very well we're constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. — John R. Searle (1932- )

36. In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. — Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)

37. Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience. — Hasidic Saying

38. In winter why do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat? — Unknown

39. Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. — George Polya (1887-1985)

40. Miss Mae West / Is one of the best: / I would rather not / Say the best what. — E. W. Fordham (1845-1925)

41. "I quite realized," said Columbus, / "That the earth was not a rhombus, / But I am a little annoyed / To find it an oblate spheroid." — E. Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956)

42. Henry the Eighth / Took a thucthethtion of mateth. / He inthithted that the monkth / Were a lathy lot of thkunkth. — E. Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956)

43. "Susaddad!" exclaimed Ibsen, / "By dose is turdig cribson! / I'd better dot kiss you. / Atishoo! Atishoo!" — E. Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956)

44. Edgar Allen Poe / Was passionately fond of roe. / He always liked to chew some / When writing anything gruesome. — E. Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956)

45. Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it. — Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

46. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. — Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

47. If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. — Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944)

48. May we each be the person someone else is grateful for. — Arlyn Newcomb (1966- )

49. We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)

50. In heaven, the police are British, the chefs are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss. In hell, the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians. — Unknown