May 2009 Quotations

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
~~ Peter De Vries [1910-93]

"If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame."
~~ Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]

"Part of the loot went for gambling and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."
~~ actor George Raft [1895-1980]

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"A nation glued to the television screen ... can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul."
~~ Adlai Stevenson [1900-65], in 1959

"My activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet."
~~ Alice Walker, in 1989

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-63]

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising."
~~ Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]

"We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!"
~~ Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote."
~~ William E. Simon

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
~~ Norman Maclean [1902-90]

"[Sociologist C. Wright] Mills is half forgotten -- perhaps because much of what he said is now taken for granted."
~~ Norman Birnbaum

"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
~~ Cyril Connolly [1903-74]

"This is the worst economy since the Great Depression."
~~ Richard Stengel, Time Magazine

"The problem with 'going with the flow' is that the flow is always downhill."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], quoted by James K. Galbraith in written testimony to Congress, February 2009

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
~~ Washington Irving [1783-1859]

"A useless life is an early death."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1842]

"There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction."
~~ Robert Brault

"When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]

"Is it weird in here, or is it just me?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the price of a song?"
~~ Lou Reed

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valley of silliness."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them."
~~ Frank A. Clark

"Higher education in America is designed to fashion plowshares into doorstops."
~~ G.E. Nordell

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}