"Life is full of constant sordid surprises. Whenever you do anything for art or the glory of God or friendship or a friend’s memory, you find someone across the board looking upon it as a business venture. If you’d thought of it in that light, you’d never have gone into it."
~~ publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. [1892-1984]
"Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one."
~~ British children's author Enid Blyton [1897-1968]
"Reality is NOT a variable. Your personal power derives from the extent that your viewpoints & beliefs match Objective Reality. Asking whether others match your viewpoints & beliefs is a stupid survey, the question to ask is whether anything that you/they believe matches existential Objective Reality."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Time is a storm in which we are all lost."
~~ American poet Wm. Carlos Williams [1883-1963]
"Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]
"The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]
"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]
"The harder the work, the greater the satisfaction in accomplishing it."
~~ Anna May Wong [USA; 1905-61]
"Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement."
~~ philosopher Will Durant [1885-1981]
"Pour ce qui est de l’avenir, il ne s’agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible."
"As far as the future is to be expected, it is not a question of predicting it, but of making it possible."
~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-44] - in "Citadelle", 1948
"Trump Republicans are running on nothing except lies and hate."
~~ Ian Reifowitz on the DailyKos newsletter, 9/2021
"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"You know [Trump is] crazy. He's crazy and what he did [January 6] is further evidence of his craziness."
~~ House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a phone call with U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley
"Gun violence is a public health crisis."
~~ daily newsletter from ThePaper free weekly newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 9/2021
"Big problems can be such big fun."
~~ line from the "Tango Shalom" movie [2021]
"Never underestimate a psychopath's capacity to do harm"
~~ headline on the DailyKos newsletter, 9/2021
". . . if I were a bird / I would fly about the Earth / seeking the successive autumns."
~~ George Eliot [1819-80]
"The road to hell is paved with both-siderism."
~~ David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones Magazine [est. 1976]
"War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times."
~~ historian Howard Zinn [1922-2010] in 2001
"I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan
"There may be people that have more talent than you, but there’s no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do."
~~ baseball great Derek Jeter
"You miss 100 percent of the shots [that] you don’t take."
~~ ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky
"It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up."
~~ football coach Vince Lombardi [1913-70]
"It’s not the will to win that matters — everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters."
~~ football coach Paul William 'Bear' Bryant [1913-83]
"You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them."
~~ baseball great Leroy Robert 'Satchel' Paige [1906-82]
"I don’t count [all] my situps. I only start counting once it starts hurting."
~~ boxing legend Muhammad Ali [1942-2016]
"The only way to prove you are a good sport is to lose."
~~ baseball great Ernie Banks [1931-2015]
"Stubbornness usually is considered a negative; but I think that trait has been a positive for me."
~~ baseball great Cal Ripken, Jr.
"It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters."
~~ boxing great Evander Holyfield
"Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard."
~~ high school basketball coach Tim Notke
"Never say never because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan
"Good is not good when better is expected."
~~ sportscaster Vin Scully [b. 1927]
"Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up."
~~ runner Dean Karnazes
"What makes something special is not just what you have to gain, but what you feel there is to lose."
~~ tennis champion Andre Agassi
"Each time you let these opportunities slip through your fingers, you’re passing a much harder problem on to the next generation. It’s a very hard thing to swallow that we are relegating children born today and not yet born to a future of dangerous climate impacts."
~~ Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology - 10/2021
'found' t-shirt text: "only in theaters!"
another 'found' t-shirt text: "not actual size"
"There is now research showing that in advanced economies two-thirds of the population are now on the track to be poorer than their parents."
~~ Rana Foroohar, associate editor at "Financial Times" - in 2020
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]
"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]
"Next in importance to having a good aim is to recognize when to pull the trigger."
~~ David Letterman
"I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life - all mystery and magic."
~~ Harry Houdini [1874-1926]
"I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I have walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read."
~~ sci-fi author George R.R. Martin
"As you know, now Rush Limbaugh is the new face of the Republican Party, but they'll probably go with a different body."
~~ David Letterman
"It's like the Wild West, the Internet. There are no rules."
~~ comedian Steven Wright
"There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola."
~~ literary critic Leslie Fiedler [1917-2003]
"I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most."
~~ British children's author Enid Blyton [1897-1968]
"A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one."
~~ banker John Pierpont 'J.P.' Morgan [1837-1913]
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
~~ Ursula K. Le Guin [1929-2018]
"The reason many people fail is not for lack of vision but for lack of resolve and resolve is born out of counting the cost."
~~ rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard [1882-1945]
"A cybernetic problem is always connected with the control of a dynamic system."
~~ mathematician & philosopher Norbert Wiener [1894-1964]
"So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?"
~~ Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-96]
"The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education."
~~ Paul K. Feyerabend [1924-94]
"Tradition is the illusion of permanance."
~~ Woody Allen
"Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems."
~~ French/Dutch philosopher René Descartes [1596-1650]
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
