July 2010 Quotations

"One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language."
~~ Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran [1911-95]

"Melancholy men are of all others most witty."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"You have zero privacy... Get over it."
~~ Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (in 1999)

"If we continue on the current path of Reality-avoidance, Mankind will be extinct in forty years. And good riddance!"
~~ G.E. Nordell

"During the [George W.] Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse."
~~ Esther Kaplan

"Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact."
~~ Richard Dawkins

"The choice is clear: either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future to overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behaviour to create a social environment in which we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardising the chances that those who follow us will be able to do the same."
~~ B.F. Skinner [1904-90], in 1948

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The opposite of hope is empowerment."
~~ Tim De Christopher

"If it is true that the human mind leans at one extreme toward the bounded, material, and useful, at the other it naturally rises toward the infinite, immaterial, and beautiful."
~~ Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59]

"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest."
~~ writer Ralph Ellison [1914-94]

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work."
~~ Émile Zola [1840-1902]

"It was possible. And possible was all [that] I needed."
~~ movie director Julie Davis

"Unsung, the noblest deed will die"
~~ Greek poet Pindar [c.522–443 B.C.E.]

"If you're going thru hell, keep going."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world."
~~ columnist Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal, in 2004

"Andrew Jackson believed that you don't measure the health of a society at the apex but at the base."
~~ U.S. Senator Jim Webb

"I was not a guy writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think."
~~ movie director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it."
~~ poet Ezra Pound [1885-1972]

"To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice."
~~ Bishop Desmond Tutu

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, a sense of humor to console him for what he is."
~~ Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Free market ideology [has] evolved from simple, old-fashioned greed into the sociopathic culture of looting [that] we see on Wall Street today."
~~ Ruth Conniff

"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"The greatest enemy of mankind is ignorance of the inherent money power in all of us. When the realization of this comes to man he will, like Sampson, push down the walls of his prison..."
~~ E.C. Riegel [1879-1953]

"It takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life."
~~ mystery author Tony Hillerman [1925-2008], in "Blessing Way" (1970)

"There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard."
~~ Martin Scorsese

"the difference between being stubborn and being principled is being right."
~~ Don Yacktman

"Growth is the only evidence of life."
~~ John Henry Newman [1801-90]

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
~~ Victor Frankl [1905-97]

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."
~~ John Wayne [1907-79], from his controversial 1971 Playboy Magazine interview, and carved onto his tombstone

"Just Do It"
~~ Nike athletic shoes ad campaign, circa 1990 (The inspiration was convicted killer Gary Gilmore, who said "Let’s do it" just before he was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1977.)

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. [1841-1935]

"It don't mean a thing If it ain't got that swing."
~~ Irving Mills [1894-1985]

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