Collected Aphorisms, Apothegms, &c

• A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
  -- Leslie Lamport
   
• A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
  -- Frank Lloyd Wright
   
• A doctor who lacks doubt is not a doctor, he is an executioner.
  -- Hercule Poirot
   
• A fanatic is one who won't change his mind and won't change the subject.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
   
• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• A man in New York City is suing McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's and KFC, saying they have made him fat. He is also suing Victoria Secret for making him play with himself.
  -- Jay Leno
   
• A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner. "Much obliged," said he, pushing the plate aside, "I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills."
  -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
   
• A mathematician, scientist, and engineer are each asked: "Suppose we define a horse's tail to be a leg. How many legs does a horse have?" The mathematician answers "5"; the scientist "1"; and the engineer says "But you can't do that!"
  -- -Me
   
• A neutron gets stopped by the police. He says, what's the charge?
  -- -Me
   
• A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
  -- Ramsey Clark
   
• A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for: Sail out to sea and do new things.
  -- Admiral Grace Hopper
   
• A true friend stabs you in the front.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• Absolute truths you can only be approached asymptotically.
  -- Gregory Chaitin
   
• Abuse is no argument against titrated use.
  -- -Me
   
• Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• All generalizations are false, including this one.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers.They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• All things will be well, all manner of things will be well.
  -- Julian of Norwich
   
• Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• Always remember that when you solve you biggest problem your second biggest problem becomes your biggest problem.
  -- J.O.Y.
   
• America's strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and a moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he -- the grandson of a slave -- felt so deeply American. His name was Martin Luther King. He made America a universal role model.
  -- Nicolas Sarkozy
   
• An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
  -- Valery
   
• An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
  -- Voltaire
   
• An optimist sees the glass half full. A pessimist sees the glass half empty. An engineer sees that the vessel is inappropriately sized for the fluid level.
  -- -Me
   
• Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
  -- Leonardo Da Vinci
   
• Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers.
  -- David Parnas
   
• As an astute German nobleman once noted, "No matter how rich you are, you can still only drink 16 or 17 liters of beer a day."
  -- Anon
   
• As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Basically, we need to find the right oversimplification to make people think they understand it. Kind of like cancelling the dx's and dy's in calculus--the physics profs always tell you to do that, while warning you not to tell the math profs they're telling you to do that, because it doesn't always work, except in real life.
  -- Larry Wall
   
• Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.
  -- Robert Heinlein
   
• Beauty is in the aye of the beholder.
  -- -Me
   
• Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.
  -- Voltaire
   
• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
  -- Donald Knuth
   
• Beware the wrath of a patient adversary.
  -- John C. Calhoun
   
• Bomb mots.
  -- -Me
   
• Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.
  -- Aristotle
   
• Bureausclerosis.
  -- -Me
   
• By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.
  -- Lord Salisbury
   
• Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism the equal distribution of misery
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• Caveat emptor secus emptor culpa.
  -- -Me
   
• Certitude is not the test of certainty.
  -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
   
• Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
  -- Graham Greene
   
• Chance favours the prepared mind.
  -- Louis Pasteur
   
• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• Criticism is easier than Craftsmanship.
  -- Zeuxis, c. 400 BC
   
• Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Decoration on a tool has to be used very carefully. It's not directly bad except when it conflicts with invisibility. If the decorations on a tool have the effect of forcing the tool into the attention of its user, then it prevents the tool from becoming invisible. [...] A "beige" interface is unobtrusive and invisible. Submergence is to be prized in a user interface over all other things.
  -- Steven Den Beste
   
• Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
  -- Alexis de Tocqueville
   
• Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• Denail is not just a wood fastener in Egypt.
  -- -Me
   
• Dessert is for people who don't drink enough.
  -- Ernest Hemingway
   
• Digging out a skunk is a dirty, smelly business. No one wants to be near you when you're done -- but someone's got to do it.
  -- Joseph Raymond McCarthy
   
• Do not look directly into laser beam with remaining eye.
  -- Sign in Sandia Lab
   
• Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.
  -- Robert A. Heinlein
   
• Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
  -- Some Dead Guy
   
• Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• Eschew escutcheons.
  -- J.O.Y.
   
• Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.
  -- Stephen Hawking
   
• Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
  -- Leonardo da Vinci
   
• Every opinion is a gamble, every decision a bet.
  -- -Me
   
• Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
  -- Franz Kafka
   
• Everyone is an artist. An engineer is an artist who figures out when to stop.
  -- -Me
   
• Everything which was not permitted was forbidden. Whatever was permitted was mandatory. Citizens were shackled in their actions by the universal passion for banning things.
  -- Boris Yeltsin
   
• Experience has established that institutions, which at the outset were useful, often end by becoming intolerable abuses owing to the simple fact that everything around them has changed [...] and they have not.
  -- Wilfrid Laurier
   
• Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
  -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
   
• 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.
  -- Galbraith's Law
   
• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  -- Aldous Huxley
   
• For eight years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government ~ sometimes frantically ~ never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile.
  -- Richard Perle
   
• For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
  -- Harrison's Postulate
   
• For the past century the world has got steadily better for most people. You do not believe that? I am not surprised. You are fed such a strong diet of news about how bad things are that it must be hard to believe they were once worse. But choose any statistic you like and it will show that the lot of even the poorest is better today than it was in 1903. [...] All this has been achieved primarily by that most hated of tricks, the technical fix. By invention, not legislation.
  -- Matt Ridley
   
• For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots.
  -- Jay Lessig
   
• Genocide, far from being prevented by governments and their instruments of control and censorship, almost inevitably takes place under their concealing shadow.
  -- Colby Cosh
   
• Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
  -- John Milton
   
• Government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.
  -- George Washington
   
• Government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
  -- Barry Goldwater
   
• Government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
  -- Chuang-Tzu
   
• Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
  -- Mahatma Gandhi
   
• Hard cases make bad law.
  -- John Campbell Argyll
   
• He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• He's a bankrupt idealist, and the poor, they're bitter people.
  -- Tod Styles in Route 66
   
• Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens know that nothing is owed to them, and that everything has to be earned. That's what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it.
  -- Nicolas Sarkozy
   
• His favourite position is beside himself and his favourite sport is jumping to conclusions.
  -- Danny Kaye
   
• Honesty is the best policy.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?
  -- Zsa Zsa Gabor
   
• How many positions would a politician take if a politician could take positions?
  -- -Me
   
• I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• I am much inclined to think that it is a good thing for a man, once at any rate in his life, to perform a public war-dance against all sorts of humbug and imposture.
  -- T. H. Huxley
   
• I am not young enough to know everything.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
  -- Woody Allen
   
• I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that could change.
  -- Dan Quayle
   
• I come from Austria, a socialist country. There you can hear 18-year-olds talking about their pension. [...] Individualism is incompatible with socialism. I felt I had to come to America where the government wasn't always breathing down your neck or standing on your shoes.
  -- Arnold Schwarzenegger
   
• I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humour.
  -- Horatio Nelson
   
• I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• I don't know whether the world is full of smart men bluffing or imbeciles who mean it.
  -- Morrie Brickman
   
• I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• I feel like it's the dawn of a new millenium. Of course, I always feel that way about the next 31.56 billion seconds.
  -- -Me
   
• I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
  -- Frank Sinatra
   
• I feel very humble, although I think I have the strength of character to fight it.
  -- Bob Hope
   
• I have made it a rule never to smoke more that one cigar at a time.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness was always breaking in.
  -- Oliver Edwards
   
• I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
  -- Albert Camus
   
• I never trusted a man who never smoked or drank.
  -- Abraham Lincoln.
   
• I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• I wish science would come up with a cure for pro-state cancer.
  -- -Me
   
• I'm not into spending money to impress people I don't even like.
  -- Phillip Marlowe
   
• I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
  -- G. K. Chesterton
   
• Ideologies are like lighthouses. They provide beacons that help us navigate away from the shoals of structureless random thought. Nevertheless, they are built upon the rocks themselves. If we get too close to lighthouses, we wreck there too.
  -- -Me
   
• If I am pressed for a straight answer I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another, in terms of the average of departments, then in the last analysis it is probably true to say that, at the end of the day, you would find, in general terms, that, not to put too fine a point on it, there really was not very much in it one way or the other, as far as one can see, at this stage. Without resorting to crude generalizations or vulgar over-simplifications, in due course, in the fullness of time, at the appropriate juncture, when the moment is ripe, when the requisite procedures have been completed, all things being considered, and making all possible allowances, I shall do my utmost to oblige.
  -- Sir Humphrey Appleby
   
• If I had enough time, I could write less.
  -- Pascal
   
• If a man does not want to be productive, he is immoral.
  -- Ayn Rand (Johnny Carson interview, 1967)
   
• If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
  -- Isaac Asimov
   
• If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
  Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction.
  -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
   
• If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
  -- John von Neumann
   
• If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
  -- Frederic Bastiat
   
• If we are not willing to say that a given Turing machine M either accepts, rejects, or runs forever (when started on a blank tape), and that which one it does is an objective fact, independent of our formal axiomatic theories, the laws of physics, the biology of the human brain, cultural conventions, &c, then we have no basis to talk about any of those other things (axiomatic theories, the laws of physics, and so on). Furthermore, M's resource requirements are irrelevant here: even if M only halts after 2²¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ steps, its output is as mathematically definite as if it had halted after 10 steps.
  -- Scott Aaronson
   
• If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall in to this vice. The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• If you are going through hell, keep going.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions, you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence.
  -- Daniel Kahneman
   
• If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.
  -- Dean Martin
   
• If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• If you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you've got a pretty sorry existence.
  -- Karl Rove
   
• If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• If you think 53 makes you old enough to retire, then fine, go ahead and retire. But don't expect the state to pay for it.
  -- Nicolas Sarkozy
   
• If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.
  -- Henny Youngman
   
• Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
  -- Tom Stoppard
   
• In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
  -- Ayn Rand
   
• In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has, to put it mildly, a fatal design flaw.
  -- Frank Zappa
   
• In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.
  -- Voltaire
   
• In my book, any restriction on one's right to associate freely with anyone he pleases, on mutually agreeable terms, is both offensive and a gross violation of human rights.
  -- Walter Williams
   
• In pluralistic societies any claim to know objectively the constituents of a worthwhile life must at the very least be treated with caution.
  -- David Seedhouse
   
• In political discussion heat is in inverse proportion to knowledge.
  -- J. G. C. Minchin
   
• In the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• Inspiration is a serendipitous thing.
  -- -Me
   
• It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder".
  -- Aldous Huxley
   
• It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.
  -- Aristotle
   
• It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• It is better to live rich than to die rich.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
  -- Voltaire
   
• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
  -- Voltaire
   
• It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
  -- Upton Sinclair
   
• It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.
  -- Thomas de Quincy
   
• It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.
  -- Henry George
   
• It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; ... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
  -- Theodore Roosevelt
   
• It is said that the civilized man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that by learned discourse, he may rise above the savage, and be closer to God. Personally however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me that I'm best.
  -- Edmund Blackadder
   
• It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged.
  -- G. K. Chesterton
   
• It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.
  -- Voltaire
   
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
  -- Aristotle
   
• It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.
  -- Will Rogers
   
• It's better to give than to receive. Especially advice.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
  -- Voltaire
   
• Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
  The proper study of mankind is Man.
  Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
  A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
  With too much knowledge for the skeptic side
  With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
  He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest.
  In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
  In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
  Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
  Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
  Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
  Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
  Still by himself abused, or disabused;
  Created half to rise, and half to fall;
  Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
  Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
  The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
  -- Alexander Pope
   
• Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
  -- Luciano Pavarotti
   
• Level playing fields are for those who lack the wit to find one tilted in their favour.
  -- Bob Lewi
   
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
  -- George Santayana
   
• Life is a dead-end street.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
  -- Isaac Asimov
   
• Life is the period of time between birth and death.
  -- -Me
   
• Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
  -- Voltaire
   
• Life is too important to be taken seriously.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• Life is tough. Life is tougher if you're stupid.
  -- John Wayne
   
• Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
  -- Frederic Bastiat
   
• Marx got one thing correct -- his beard.
  -- -Me
   
• Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
  -- Leonardo da Vinci
   
• Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always a vice.
  -- Thomas Paine
   
• Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought: to philosophy and theology.
  -- Pope Benedict XVI
   
• Money cannot buy friends, but you get a better class of enemy.
  -- Spike Milligan
   
• Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
  -- H. G. Wells
   
• Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• Most everybody I see knows the truth but they just don't know that they know it.
  -- Woody Guthrie
   
• Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• Mother told me a couple of years ago, "Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man." I said, "Mom, I am a rich man."
  -- Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre (Cher)
   
• Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
  -- Aristotle
   
• My autobiography is in its third printing. The first two were blurred.
  -- Henny Youngman
   
• My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.
  -- Henny Youngman
   
• Mycologists have high morel values.
  -- -Me
   
• Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. All errors he is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to do what they deem his good.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.
  -- Isaac Asimov
   
• Never spend your money before you have earned it.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
  -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
   
• No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
  -- Lord Salisbury
   
• No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
  -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
   
• No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.
  -- Horace
   
• Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
  -- Milton Friedman
   
• Not knowing the truth is not the same as knowing the false, and vice versa.
  -- -Me
   
• Not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
  -- Daniel Kahneman
   
• Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
   
• Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
  -- Leonardo da Vinci
   
• Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
  -- C. S. Lewis
   
• Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law", because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• On the other hand you have different fingers.
  -- Steven Wright
   
• Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
  -- W. C. Fields
   
• One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.
  -- Luciano Pavarotti
   
• One's company, two's a relationship, three's politics, four's a crowd, five's a mob.
  -- -Me
   
• Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
  -- Groucho Marx
   
• Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• Patience is the companion of wisdom.
  -- Augustine
   
• People never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
  -- Edmund Burke
   
• People occasionally stumble upon the truth, but generally pick themselves up and carry on.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• People's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
  -- Oscar Wilde
   
• Pious aphorisms and intensive introspection are not a plan.
  -- Steven Den Beste
   
• Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke
   
• Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
  -- Groucho Marx
   
• Postneologism.
  -- -Me
   
• Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
  -- Edward R. Tufte
   
• Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
  -- Niels Bohr
   
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
  -- Donald Knuth
   
• Pride is the gateway to hubris.
  -- -Me
   
• Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
  -- Aristotle
   
• Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil -- only evil -- and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs.
  -- Roger Q. Mills
   
• Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
  -- Phillip K. Dick
   
• Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
  -- Aristotle
   
• She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.
  -- Raymond Chandler
   
• Show business is just like high school, except you get paid.
  -- Martin Mull
   
• So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• So many problems like Maria, so little time.
  -- -Me
   
• Some people say they are in favour of banning gambling. But what about elections?
  -- Barry Goldwater (on Dean Martin roast of James Stewart)
   
• Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
  -- Carl Sagan
   
• Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.
  -- Neil Armstrong
   
• The America I love is one that encourages entreprenurs, not speculators.
  -- Nicolas Sarkozy
   
• The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. [...] America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
  -- John F. Kennedy
   
• The advantage of easy oragami is two-fold.
  -- Tim Vine
   
• The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
  -- Aristotle
   
• The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
  -- Voltaire
   
• The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
  -- Winston Churchill
   
• The best is the enemy of the good.
  -- Voltaire
   
• The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• The cat is not rebaggable.
  -- -Me
   
• The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.
  -- Wafa Sultan
   
• The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West."
  -- Alan Charles Kors
   
• The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The computer center is empty,
  Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
  I walk the rows of CPUs,
  My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
  I open a door, cold and hard.
  And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
  A machine without soul, men call it,
  But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
  Within it lie the years of our lives,
  Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
  The algorithmic exultations,
  The long nights filled with thankless toil,
  I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
  And in the darkened offices,
  The terminals shine like stars.
  -- From "The Zen of Programming" by Geoffrey James
   
• The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.
  -- Michael Oakeshott
   
• The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• The first mistake in public business is the going into it.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
  -- Adlai E. Stevenson
   
• The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism.
  -- Pope John Paul II
   
• The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.
  -- Richard P. Feynman
   
• The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid.
  -- Edward Prescott
   
• The interesting thing about analogies is where they break down.
  -- H.J.H.
   
• The main thing that is lacking at the moment is humility. The climate experts have set them selves up as being guardians of the truth. They think they have the truth. That's a dangerous situation.
  -- Freeman Dyson
   
• The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
  -- Carl Jung
   
• The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
  -- Tacitus
   
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
  -- Isaac Asimov
   
• The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
  -- Marcus Aurelius
   
• The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
  -- Marty Feldman
   
• The pleasures of the table - that lovely old-fashioned phrase - depict food as an art form, as a delightful part of civilized life. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal. Life is to be joyous, and joy comes from sensory pleasures shared with others.
  -- Julia Child
   
• The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
  -- Plato
   
• The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.
  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
   
• The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
  -- Hubert H. Humphrey
   
• The road to utopia is paved with tombstones.
  -- -Me
   
• The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.
  -- Thomas Sowell
   
• The scientist seeks to understand what is; the engineer seeks to create what never was.
  -- Theodor von Karman
   
• The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
  -- Frederic Bastiat
   
• The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
  -- Lily Tomlin
   
• The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.
  -- William James
   
• The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The way my luck is running, if I were a politician I would be an honest man.
  -- Rodney Dangerfield
   
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
  -- Bertrand Russell
   
• There are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
  -- James Madison
   
• There are some things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
  -- Niels Bohr
   
• There are three kinds of people, those who can count, and those who can't.
  -- Anon
   
• There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.
  -- Indira Gandhi
   
• There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant goals, and each needs the other.
  -- Carl Sagan
   
• There is no problem in the world today that could not be made much worse by a UN conference.
  -- Mark Steyn
   
• There is one axiom: Existence exists.
  -- -Me
   
• There's a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego, which can be destructive. The guy with a strong ego knows his own strength. He is confident. But the guy with a large ego is always looking for recognition. He constantly needs to be patted on the back.
  -- Lee Iacocca
   
• There's been an increase in concern, not in incidence.
  -- Steven Pinker
   
• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• Those who are mentally and emotionally healthy are those who have learned when to say yes, when to say no, and when to say whoopee.
  -- W. S. Krabill
   
• Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
  -- John F. Kennedy
   
• Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
   
• To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
  -- Thomas Jefferson
   
• To create a sculpture just remove the unnecessary material.
  -- Michelangelo
   
• To each according to his ability. From each according to his charity.
  -- -Me
   
• To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.
  -- Benjamin Franklin
   
• To hear one voice clearly, we must have freedom to hear them all.
  -- Kerry Brock
   
• To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
  -- Woody Allen
   
• Twenty-four hours in a day, twenty-four beers in a case. Coincidence?
  -- Stephen Wright
   
• Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• Usenet is essentially Letters to the Editor without the editor. Editors don't appreciate this, for some reason.
  -- Larry Wall
   
• Wake up and smell the writing on the wall coming.
  -- -Me
   
• War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
  -- Edward M. Forster
   
• We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
  -- Thomas Babington Macaulay
   
• We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
   
• We make war so that we may live in peace.
  -- Aristotle
   
• We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.
  -- Ronald Reagan
   
• We should strive always to keep our friendships in repair.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• What consenting adults do is their own business, and it's not up to me to comment on it one way or another, and it's not what people want from government officials.
  -- Stephen Harper
   
• What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.
  -- Friedrich Hoderlin
   
• What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
  -- Samuel Johnson
   
• What was really amazing was the speed with which the Americans adapted themselves. They were assisted in this by their tremendous practical and material sense and by their lack of all understanding for tradition and useless theories.
  -- Erwin Rommel
   
• What we observe is not the Nature itself but the Nature exposed to our method of questioning.
  -- Werner Heisenberg
   
• What will I do with the salary I am making as a pitcher? Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women, and Irish whiskey. The other ten percent I'll probably waste.
  -- Tug McGraw
   
• What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Whatever you can provide yourself with to secure protection from men is a natural good.
  -- Epicurus
   
• When God gave Moses the Eighth Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," I'm sure that he didn't mean thou shalt not steal unless there is a majority vote in Congress.
  -- Walter Williams
   
• When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
  -- Henny Youngman
   
• When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke
   
• When emotion is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb.
  -- -Me
   
• When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
  -- H. L. Mencken
   
• When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.
  -- Confucius
   
• When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried.
  -- Mae West
   
• Where there's a way, there's a will.
  -- Larry Wall
   
• Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge will be shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
  -- Albert Einstein
   
• Wine is bottled poetry.
  -- Robert Louis Stevenson
   
• Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
  -- Galileo
   
• Wisdom is a compass, not a GPS.
  -- -Me
   
• With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation.
  -- John Stuart Mill
   
• Witless Protection Program
  -- Anon
   
• Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
  -- Mark Twain
   
• Yes, there is a real dilemma here, in that while it has been government policy to regard policy as the responsibility of ministers, and administration as the responsibility of officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts or overlaps with responsibility for the policy for the administration of policy.
  -- Sir Humphrey Appleby
   
• You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
  -- Ronald Regan
   
• You can lead a stitch in time to save nine, but you can't make it think.
  -- -Me
   
• You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
  -- Steven Wright
   
• You can't walk a mile while looking through another man's shoes.
  -- -Me
   
• You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
   
• You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.
  -- John von Neuman (to Richard Feynman)
   
• You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
  -- John Morley