July 2013 Quotations (60)

"The purpose of mortality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"For many Americans, the end of the world is already here."
~~ Aaron Thier, in 2013

"Some succeed because they are destined to; most succeed because they are determined to."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]

"Words, like bread, are sacred."
~~ Rudolfo Anaya

"Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." {Often quoted as the shorter "Action from principle ... is essentially revolutionary."}
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Theology is simply the part of religion that requires brains."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"How many people does it take to change a searchlight bulb?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence."
~~ rock star Jim Morrison [1943-71]

"We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay."
~~ cartoonist Lynda Barry

"When the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters."
~~ theologian Nathaniel Emmons [1745-1840]

"Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it."
~~ Gloria Steinem

"Happiness and confidence are the greatest things [that] you can wear."
~~ Taylor Swift

"Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business."
~~ Dave Barry

"Be alone – that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
~~ Nikola Tesla [1856-1943]

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."
~~ Ursula K. Le Guin

"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation."
~~ author Helen Hunt Jackson [1830-85]

"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]

"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"Conservatives are those who worship dead radicals."
~~ William Rehnquist [1924-2005], U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"Often things [that] you think are just beginning are coming to an end."
~~ John Dos Passos [1896-1970]

"We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Some tunnels just happen to be longer than others."
~~ author Ada Adams

"What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."
~~ George Eastman [1854-1932], founder of Eastman Kodak Co.

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]

"If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."
~~ Bette Reese

“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those that spring from any other cause.”
~~ George Washington [1732-99]

"When a religion is good, I conceive [that] it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"Character is simply habit long continued."
~~ Plutarch [46?–127 C.E.]

"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."
~~ physicist John A. Wheeler [1911-2008]

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."
~~ Jacques Barzun [1907-2012]

"The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"The truth stalks us like bad credit."
~~ Ta-nehisi Coates

"Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball underwater."
~~ Karen Duffy

"The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."
~~ Viscountess Nancy Astor [1879-1964]

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong."
~~ journalist Robert Kuttner

"When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."
~~ food show host Anthony Bourdain

"A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"A loser says that's the way [that] it's always been done. A winner says [that] there ought to be a better way."
~~ columnist Sydney J. Harris [1917-86]

"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed'."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"A good half of the art of living is resilience."
~~ Alain de Botton of Switzerland

"A friend to all is a friend to none."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
~~ writer Sylvia Plath [1932-63]

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as a good burglar."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"The definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac."
~~ David Mamet

"The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"The size of a planet doesn't strike until you start looking for something."
~~ David Sedaris

"If a woman never lets herself go, how will she know how far she might have got?"
~~ Germaine Greer

"Action is the antidote to despair."
~~ singer-songwriter Joan Baez

"As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"We do not know what to do with this short life, but we want another which will be eternal."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]

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