I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Only the mediocere are always at their best.
- Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)
A child is a curly, dimpled lunitic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
- Socrates (470-399 B.C.)
After I'm dead I'd rather have a person ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
- Cato the Elder (234-149 B.C.)
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped
- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
(honk)
- Harpo Marx (1888-1964)
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!
traditional poem/prayer attributed to Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish peoples
Last night I saw upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again to day. Oh how I wish he'd go away!
- Unknown
A monarchy is a merchantman (a type of sailing ship) which sails well, but will sometimes strike a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.
- 1795 US House of Representatives - Fisher Ames (1758-1808)
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Democracy substitues the election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
An ambassador is a honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.
- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
A statesman is a politician who has been dead for ten or fifteen years.
- Harry S. Truman (1884-1972)
By wire and wireless, in a score of bad translations,
They give their simple message to the world of man:
'Man can have Unity if Man will give up Freedom.
The State is real, the Individual is wicked;
Violence shall synchronize your movements like a tune,
And Terror like frost shall halt the flood of thinking.
Barrack and bivouac shall be your friendly refuge,
And racial pride shall tower like a public column
And confiscate for safety every private sorrow.'
'Leave Truth to the police and us; we know the Good;
We build the Perfect City time shall never alter;
Our Law shall guard you alwaya like a cirque of mountains,
Your Ignorance keep off evil like a dangerous sea;
You shall be consummated in the General Will,
Your children innocent and charming as the beasts.'
And, if we care to listen, we can always hear them:
'Men are not innocent as beasts and never can be,
Man can improve himself but never will himself be perfect,
Only the free have disposition to be truthful,
Only the truthful have the interest to be just,
Only the just posses the will-power to be free.'
- W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
Few people can be happy unless thay hate some other person, nation, or creed.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Content thyself to be obscurely good.
- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,
The post of honour is a private station.
It is better to have loved and lost then never to have lost at all.
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
- John Donne (1517?-1631)
One murder makes a villian, millions a hero.
- Beiby Porteus (1731-1808)
Nothing is said that has not been said before.
- Terence (185-159 B.C.)
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Power tends to corrupt and absolute poer corrupts absolutely.
- Lord Action (1834-1902)
Cult (definition) the church down the street from your own. - from Wiley's dictionary, B.C comic strip by Johnny Hart
Without the voice of reason, every faith is it's own curse
- Sting
Living with a saint is more grueling then being one
- Robert Neville
There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
- Francis Bacon (1571-1626)
The human mind treats new ideas the way a body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
- biologist P.B. Medawar
Most people would sooner die then think; in fact, they do so.
- Bertrabd Russell (1872-1970)
We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), said to John Hancock at the signing of the American Declaration of Independence
Hunger allow no choice
To the citizen or the police
We must love one another or die.
said September 1, 1939 - W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
- Thomas Berger Back