December 2009 Quotations

"Technology keeps changing, but the minute any technology appears it becomes indespensible."
~~ E.L. Doctorow

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1981-1973]

"A good story cannot be devised, it has to be distilled."
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"In the reality-TV era, unstable behavior [has] become a valid career choice."
~~ James Poniewozick

"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time is now."
~~ African proverb

"The most beautiful thing [that] we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"The human ability to innovate out of a jam is profound. That's why Darwin will always be right and Malthus will always be wrong."
~~ K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy

"Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80], in 1876

"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Your mother has to be there when you are born, but nobody has to be there when you die."
~~ William Campbell Gault [1910-95]

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"If you look at the suffering around you, you can't be happy."
~~ Austrian film director Michael Haneke

"Contradictions are what make a writer interesting; consistency is for cooking."
~~ critic James Wood

"It has so happened in all the ages of the world that some have laboured and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82], in 1838

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
~~ Theodosius Dobzhansky [1900-75]

"History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us."
~~ Julian Barnes

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."
~~ Anton Checkov [1860-1904]

"There are worlds of money wasted, at this [Holiday Season] time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got."
~~ Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-96], in 1850

"When nothing is tried nothing will happen."
~~ Joost van Steenis

"The measure of a man is how he deals with tragedy."
~~ Troy Duffy

"Somebody always has to be the n*gger."
~~ half-Jamaican author Malcolm Gladwell

"These days you don't run into all that many people who make use of a moral compass."
~~ Stephen Greenleaf

"There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means."
~~ Calvin Coolidge [1872-1933]

"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"The map is not the territory / the menu is not the meal / the score is not the music."
~~ Dutch composer George Overmeire

"If a story is in you, it has got to come out."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"The great cause of this [financial] crisis is the incredible greed and selfishness that exist in the ruling elite of America. They have no shame."
~~ Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in 2009 speech

"Why must the show go on?"
~~ Noël Coward [1899-1973]

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