December 2012 Quotations

"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]

"It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office."
~~ Shirley MacLaine

"To the surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be the best system for determining which of two things is larger."
~~ cartoonist Randall Munroe

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."
~~ Alice Munro

"Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed."
~~ Erica Jong

"It's easy to be miserable. Being happy is tougher – and cooler."
~~ Thom Yorke, member of the rock band Radiohead

"Poetry should be written the way [that] adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened."
~~ poet Vera Pavlova

"It would seem that something [that] means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge."
~~ Phyllis Diller [1917-2012]

"I'm getting ready to be a parent. I just turned 30, and I'm tired of mowing the grass."
~~ Jeff Foxworthy

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]

"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there is less of you."
~~ Margaret Atwood

"Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Do something instead of killing time, because time is killing you."
~~ Brasilian author Paulo Coelho

"The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste."
~~ playwright Joe Orton

"While the election is over, the class war isn't."
~~ New York Times, November 2012

"I must live until I die – mustn't I?"
~~ Joseph Conrad [1857-1924], in "N*gger of The Narcissus", 1897 novella

"All [that] I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl."
~~ Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977]

"Inherently, each of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our goals and dreams define. What is missing from each of us is the training, education, knowledge, and insight to utilize what we already have."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

“The most political act you can do is raise a child well.”
~~ Wendell Berry

"The stone and the tiger have no choice of life: the stone must gravitate and the tiger must pounce. Only human beings are faced with the mind-boggling responsibility of having, at each and every moment of their lives, to choose what to do and what to be. It is both a necessity and an invitation."
~~ José Ortega y Gassett [1883-1955]

"There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Romanticism ... deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned – in the words of Aristotle – not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]

"Sports is the only profession I know that when you retire, you have to go to work."
~~ basketball star Earl Monroe

"If you can convince yourself that you look fabulous, you can save yourself the trouble of primping."
~~ Andy Warhol [1928-87]

"Start planning before you think you should."
~~ Martha Stewart

"For every minute [that] you are angry, you lost 60 seconds of happiness."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"True friends stab you in the front."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
~~ poet Muriel Rukeyser [1913-80]

"If it weren't for problems, the work day would be over by 10 a.m."
~~ Woody Allen

"Anyone who thinks [that] the world would be a better place if it were run by women doesn't remember high school."
~~ Madeleine Albright

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you."
~~ Leonard Cohen

"You just can't beat the person who won't give up."
~~ baseball great George Herman 'Babe' Ruth, Jr. [1895-1948]

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]

"The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare."
~~ basketball coach Bobby Knight

"Why is it that when we talk to God we are said to be praying, but when God talks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?"
~~ Lily Tomlin

"Prejudice is the raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety."
~~ Ben Hecht [1894-1964]

"I like work: It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
~~ Jerome K. Jerome [1859-1927]

"No sinner forgets his vows of repentance so quickly as one whose fortunes have made a dramatic improvement."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
~~ Charles Lutwidge Dodson {aka Lewis Carroll} [1832-98]

"Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire: it extinguishes the small, it rekindles the great."
~~ Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy [1618-93]

"Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offense."
~~ Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

“Our lives begin to end the day [that] we become silent about things that matter.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"Never underestimate America's willingness to do exactly the wrong thing."
~~ blogger Digby {pseudonym of Heather Parton of Santa Monica, California}

"Whatever you are, be a good one."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, if only for an instant."
~~ Brasilian architect Oscar Niemeyer [1907-2012]

“Memory presents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.”
~~ (Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]

"Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come home."
~~ Bill Cosby

"We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business."
~~ Vineet Jain, managing director of Times of India

"[The modern Republican Party] has become a party of hypocrisy masquerading as principled ideology."
~~ Robert Reich

"Let us make our time on Earth . . . worthwhile, and do what’s right, and make a difference for the children, our working families, and our elderly."
~~ New Mexico politician Ben Luján [1935-2012]

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