August 2011 Quotations

"What's the difference between Congress and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision."
~~ variation on an old joke

"The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate, a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover from the Great Crisis, and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change."
~~ James K. Galbraith

"The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe."
~~ Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]

“In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist [that] they be cheerleaders.”
~~ Steve Allen [1921-2000]

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas upon which the women paint their dreams."
~~ Rudolph Valentino [1895-1926]

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"He who opens a school door, closes a prison."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
~~ Malcolm Forbes [1919-90]

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money [is] a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men."
~~ Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]

"The only ends for which governments are constituted, and obedience render'd to them, are the obtaining of justice and protection; and they who cannot provide for both give the people a right of taking such ways as best please themselves, in order to [affect] their own safety." ~~ Algernon Sidney [1623-83] in 1672

"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
~~ (Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]

"There are few things more liberating in life than having your worst fear realized."
~~ Conan O'Brien

"Progress is not created by contented people."
~~ cartoonist Frank Tyger

"There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere."
~~ Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
~~ John W. Gardner [1912-2002]

"Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

“I think it’s bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension."
~~ Norman Mailer [1923-2007]

“You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.”
~~ Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield [1804-81]

"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something."
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]

"Take the course opposite to custom and you will always do well."
~~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-78]

"A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself."
~~ columnist Doug Larson

"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
~~ Martin Buber [1878-1965]

"Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken."
~~ David Hume [1711-76]

"All great innovation is built on rejection."
~~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline [1894-1961]

"All writing is a sin against speechlesssness."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]

"Corporations are people, my friend. Of course they are." ~~ leading fascist presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in August 2011

"A great deal more is known than has been proved."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"The only problem with country music is that it kills plants."
~~ former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, trailing presidential candidate

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