February 2012 Quotations

"At this point, the Republican candidates for U.S. President in 2012 can be referred to as 'The Four Stooges'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess."
~~ lawyer Louis Nizer [1902-94]

"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."
~~ Madame de Stael [1766-1817]

"Democrats would never win if we took away women's right to vote."
~~ Ann 'The Man' Coulter

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
~~ Noam Chomsky

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
~~ British prime-minister William Pitt [1759-1806]

"You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep."
~~ Navajo Proverb

“We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere."
~~ Frank A. Clark [1911-91]

"All ideals are dangerous: because they debase and brand the actual; all are poisons, but indispensable as temporary cures."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."
~~ aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"I had, out of my sixty teachers, a scant half dozen who couldn't have been supplanted by phonographs."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"Getting old is not for sissies."
~~ actress Bette Davis [1908-89]

"I make my pictures for people, not for critics."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today – perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850."
~~ Adam Gopnik

"Since the 1980s, the great American principle that we're all free to start our own business has been deliberately distorted into an ideology that labels as 'socialist' any regulations that block businesses from lying, stealing, polluting, maiming, or even killing our citizens."
~~ Laura Sanchez of Los Lunas, New Mexico

"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Don't you walk away from that vote! People died for the right to vote!"
~~ Rev. Jesse Jackson, in 1984 speech

"It takes two to speak truth, one to speak and another to hear."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"How can [our] society that is so undemocratic claim to be a model of democracy for others?"
~~ comment on IMDb by 'green elephant' of Canada

"I'm not concerned about the very poor."
~~ candidate Mitt Romney

"The only thing new in this world is the history we don't know."
~~ Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking is merely calisthenics with words."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"It's impossible not to take advantage of the people. The trick is to take advantage of them in their own best interest."
~~ Ralph Ellison [1914-94]

"They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"Expectation is the root of all heartache."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]

"Words are like money. There is nothing so useless, except when put to use."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"We cannot control the evil tongues of others, but a good life enables us to disregard them."
~~ Cato the Elder [234-149 B.C.E.]

"Discussion is an exhange of knowledge; an argument is an exchange of ignorance."
~~ journalist Robert Quillen

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Actions define character, not the other way around."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but there is no way around them."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"A healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism."
~~ Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz [1941-2011]

"Battling ignorance and apathy and magical thinking is a full-time job."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"In the end, I want you to join my gang. I do not want to join yours."
~~ poet Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931]

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