Quotes, April 2004
01. C’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur
[It gives double pleasure to deceive the deceiver]
- La Fontaine
02. Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
- Unknown
03. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
- Oscar Wilde
04. If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!
- Robert A. Heinlein
05. Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
- Voltaire
06. The person who knows how will always have a job. The person who knows why will always be his boss.
- Unknown
07. The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
- Aristotle
08. Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.
- Unknown
09. People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbours.
- Edgar Watson Howe
10. My only hobby is laziness, which naturally rules out all others.
- Unknown
11. Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.
- Michel Eyquen de Montaigne
12. I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
- Albert Camus
13. Never grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.
- Unknown
14. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
- George Burns
15. Smart girls know how to play tennis, piano and dumb.
- Lynn Redgrave
16. Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
- Unknown
17. I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
- Benedict Spinoza
18. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable … A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
- H.L. Mencken
19. Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
- Unknown
20. One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
- Franklin Thomas
21. It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
- Honoré de Balzac
22. In free countries, every man is entitled to express his opinions and every other man is entitled not to listen.
- Unknown
23. Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.
- John Locke
24. Love of justice in most men is no more than the fear of suffering injustice.
- De La Rochefoucauld
25. Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.
- Dan Barker
26. While intelligent people can often simplify the complex, a fool is more likely to complicate the simple.
- Unknown
27. Der Starke ist am mächtigsten allein
[The strong is mightiest when alone]
- Schiller, (from "Wilhelm Tell")
28. Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
- Honoré de Balzac
29. The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.
-Tacitus
30. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
- John Donne
Back to main page
