September 2009 Quotations

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Here's a new internet acronym: BOO! (Blame it on Obama!)".
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Empire is the only way to honor avarice and morality, the only way to be good and wealthy."
~~ William Appleman Williams [1921-90]

"One of [Reagan's] great gifts to America was the public rebirth of bigotry."
~~ Jonathan Valin

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then applying the wrong remedies."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose."
~~ Jean Anouilh [1910-87], in the stageplay "Cecile" (1954)

"There are more fools in the world than there are people."
~~ Heinrich Heine [1797-1856]

"Half of knowing what you want is knowing what you have to give up to get it."
~~ Sidney Howard [1891-1939] {not Calvin Coolidge}

"The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self-regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business."
~~ Roger Rosenblatt (Time Magazine essay 12/2001)

"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"There can be no progress if people have no faith in tomorrow."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]

"All the world over I'll back the masses against the classes."
~~ William Gladstone [1809-98]

"Our age ... needs people capable of real heroism – not the kind of heroism which ends up in glory – but the kind which ends up bringing out and making available the truth, what works, what is honest and real."
~~ Werner Erhard

"Getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw civilization of ours – pretty wasteful, pretty cruel ... And in a lot of respects we Americans are the rawest and crudest of all. Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution – all wrong, out of gear. We've stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we've got to start to make this world over."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931], in 1912

"We need to fix the climate, and we need to start yesterday."
~~ Kevin Drum

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; and inside a dog, it's too dark to read."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"New Orleans isn't a city, it's an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge."
~~ James Lee Burke

"It is time [that] men allowed their imaginations to infect their intellect."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985], in 1956

"Republicans are worried about voter fraud – [it] seems there is not enough of it."
~~ Kate Clinton

"All we want is to be completely human and in each other's company."
~~ Joseph Campbell [1904-87]

"Friendship is like peeing in your pants – everyone can see it, but only YOU can feel its true warmth."
~~ viral email, 2009

"To me, philosophy is everything. It is the way [that] one lives."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Here's a new and useful word: 'Re(publi)tard'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"They is a very vague term."
~~ Agatha Christie [1890-1976]

"Familiarity breeds contempt only among [movie] critics."
~~ Richard Corliss, in Time Magazine

"The gullibilty of the public [has become] an economic resource."
~~ Wendell Berry

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence"
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Modern conservatism has decayed from the positive, pragmatic force [that] its founders envisioned into a bitter resistance movement that's given up on fresh ideas."
~~ Randy James, in Time Magazine

"Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing."
~~ Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931], in 1915

"The economy is so bad that Baskin Robbins is down to 22 flavors."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”
~~ J. Robert Oppenheimer [1904-67]

"I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. ... Not this time. Not now."
~~ President Barack Obama, on 9 September 2009

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]

"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

“Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everybody else?“
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

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