March 2012 Quotations

"The Republican Party is the 'special olympics' for politicians."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."
~~ Lionel Trilling [1905-75]

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."
~~ Thornton Wilder [1897-1975]

"The tavern chair is the throne of human felicity."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person."
~~ Quentin Crisp [1908-99]

"Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."
~~ Langston Hughes [1902-67]

"A smile is the shortest distance between two people."
~~ Victor Borge [1909-2000]

"The first 40 years of life give us the text; the next 30 supply the commentary."
~~ Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]

"Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"We can never be sure that the opinion ]that] we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still."
~~ John Stuart Mill [1806-73]

"It's too bad [that] the people who really know how to run the country are so busy cutting hair and driving taxis."
~~ George Burns [1896-1996]

"A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults."
~~ lawyer Louis Nizer [1902-94]

"The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less."
~~ Eldridge Cleaver [1935-98]

"Ideology is just a pejorative word for principles in which you happen not to believe."
~~ Lexington column in "The Economist"

"Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures, and that is character."
~~ Horace Greeley [1811-72]

"We must learn to love life without ever trusting it."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"Woman was God's second mistake."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."
~~ bookseller Lewis Micheaux [1885-1976]
in "The Black Power Mixtape" docufilm [2011]

“I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute . . . To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up.”
~~ Rick Santorum
"Rick Santorum makes me want to throw up."
~~ Spokane, Washington blogger 'duroc'

"Many of life's failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"Alcohol may lead nowhere, but it sure is the scenic route."
~~ columnist Molly Ivins [1944-2007]

"If you survive long enough, you are revered, rather like an old building."
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]

"They failed because they did not start with a dream."
~~ Nick Shakespeare

"Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money."
~~ Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954], U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1941-54

"What looks like tomorrow's problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around."
~~ journalist James Fallows

"All our life is but a mass of habits."
~~ William James [1842-1910]

"Worry is like a rocking chair: It gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere."
~~ Erma Bombeck [1927-96]

"The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world's problems."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"There is a dilemma, to reconcile three time scales: in the short term, the economy; in the middle range, global well-being generally; and, in the long range, the environment."
~~ Matthieu Ricard

"Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise."
~~ Thomas Gray [1716-71]

"They only call it class war when we fight back."
~~ cover art of Z Magazine

"Readers should be led into temptation."
~~ Anthony Lane, New Yorker Magazine reviewer

"One sits and beats an old tin can lard pail / One beats and beats for that which one believes"
~~ poet Wallace Stevens [1879-1955]

"Reality is a dirty word for me. There's too much of it about."
~~ director Ken Russell [1927-2011]

"Learn from the masses, and then teach them."
~~ Chairman Mao Tse-tung [1893-1976]

"Take my country forward."
~~ Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

"Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture."
~~ aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]

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