Favorite quotes

Stan54
Sun May 04, 2008 10:54 am

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship,
design a building, write a sonnett, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure,
program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long


TinyMontgomery

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress." (Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan)


Frances Jones

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. "
Of Human Bondage by W.Somerset Maugham


Stan54

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself." -- Henry Miller


TinyMontgomery

"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it." (Sir Alfred Hitchcock)


Frances Jones

TinyMontgomery wrote:"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it." (Sir Alfred Hitchcock)

this one is very true


some more i really like

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Mahatma Gandhi

"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." -- Robert F. Kennedy

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."-- Robert F. Kennedy

"Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" -- George Bernard Shaw


Stan54

Television....

(1) I find TV very educational; whenever anyone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx

(2) "Television is the only medium in which one million people can laugh at the same joke at the same time, but still be lonely." - Fred Allen

(3) "Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?" - Al Boliska

(4) "TV - chewing gum for the eyes." - Frank Lloyd Wright


pinhedz

"Making love to her was as sweet as sucking marrow from a bone."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn


helix23

"I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

-Patrick Henry


pinhedz

"You could get ten years in Levenworth, or 'leven years in twelveworth."
-- Chico Marx


Stan54

"A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere."
"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. "
"A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running."
"A man's only as old as the woman he feels."
"A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke."
"Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse."
"All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats."
"Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot."
"Before I speak, I have something important to say."
"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it." -- Groucho Marx


pinhedz

Groucho: "Allow me to introduce myself--I'm Professor Wagstaff from Huxley College."
Chico: "That means nothing to me."
Grocuho: "Well, it doesn't mean that much to me either. how about Professor Huxley from Wagstaff College?"


pinhedz

"In the year 1869, Mr. Fish [in Gardener's Chronicle, April 17, 1869] rejected my conclusions with respect to the part which worms have played in the formation of vegetable mould, merely on account of their assumed incapacity to do much work. He remarks that "considering their weakness and their size, the work they are represented to have accomplished is stupendous." Here we have an instance of that inability to sum up the effects of a continually recurring cause, which has often retarded the progress of science, ..."

-- Charles Darwin


pinhedz

*uh-oh. I might have killed this thread*


Nah Ville Sky Chick

"Tell her, when your eye fell out your dong got big"

Something like that anyway.

Nah Ville Sky Chick wrote:"Tell her, when your eye fell out your dong got big"

Something like that anyway.

-- Steinbeck

Host:
Do you believe that a woman is the compliment of a man?

Miss Antioquia:
Good night to everyone
I believe that a man himself compliments a man
Woman with woman
Man with man
And also, woman to man, in the same manner, in the opposite sense
And we exist to give each other care
[audience members start to giggle]
To give ourselves love
And...
A woman is the compliment of a man
In a very beautiful sense
Because love is given
And also provides care
Eh... the world is evolving
And each time we give more love to the men who... in the case of Colombia... used to be machistas once upon a time...
[audience applauds]

Quotes of the Duke of Wellington:


The hardest thing of all for a soldier is to retreat.


Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.


The Lord's prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.


I used to say of him [Napoleon] that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.


I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.


Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.


The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.


All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill.'


It has been a damned serious business - Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing - the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life...By God! I don't think it would have done if I had not been there.


Yes, and they went down very well too.
- A retort to a comment on how very well French cavalry had come up at Waterloo.


Up, Guards, and at 'em.

It is very true that I have said that I considered Napoleon's presence in the field equal to forty thousand men in the balance. This is a very loose way of talking; but the idea is a very different one from that of his presence at a battle being equal to a reinforcement of forty thousand men.


I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.
- Of the British Parliament.


My rule always was to do the business of the day in the day.


The only thing I am afraid of is fear.


People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling - all stuff - no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children -- some for minor offences -- many more for drink.


Hard pounding, gentlemen. Let's see who pounds the longest.


Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must.


We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France.


As Lord Chesterfield said of the generals of his day, 'I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names, he trembles as I do.'"


The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.
- attributed to Wellington, but doubtful.


Ours (our army) is composed of the scum of the earth - the mere scum of the earth.


Publish and be damned.
- Replying to a blackmail threat.


My Lord,
If I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence which surrounds me, I should be debarred from the serious business of campaigning...
So long as I retain an independent position, I shall see no officer under my command is debarred by attending to the futile driveling of mere quill-driving from attending to his first duty, which is and always has been to train the private men under his command that they may without question beat any force opposed to them in the field.
- To the Secretary of State for War during the Peninsular Campaign


I mistrust the judgement of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned.


Be discreet in all things, and so render it unnecessary to be mysterious about any.


Being born in a stable does not make one a horse
- A retort to being called Irish.


It has been a damned nice thing - the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life, by God!


Another Side to the Iron Duke

The Duke once met a little boy, crying by the road. "Come now, that's no way for a young gentleman to behave. What's the matter?" he asked.
"I have to go away to school tomorrow," sobbed the child, "and I'm worried about my pet toad. There's no-one else to care for it and I shan't know how it is."
Keen to ease the little chap's discomfort, the Duke promised to attend to the matter personally.
After the boy had been at school for just over a week, he received a note: "Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Master ---- and has the pleasure to inform him that his toad is well."

"Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshipped the planetary gods, uttered the lawful syllables of a powerful name and slept. Almost immediately, he dreamt of a beating heart."

- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins" (trans. James E. Irby)

"So you light a dog-end smoke, and you're laughing as you choke, and you give the wheel of fortune one more spin."

- Firewater, "Bourbon and Division"

"Russians are just like Americans, but without money."

-- A Vietnamese citizen (who preferred not to be identified)

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do." -Oscar Gamble

"We are not women, and we will keep fighting."

-- Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi

"You can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two."

-- Anonymous

Somehow we ended up with two "Favorite Quotes" threads.

http://acrosstheuniverse.forummotion.com/t73-favorite-quotes?highlight=quotes

pinhedz wrote:Somehow we ended up with two "Favorite Quotes" threads.

http://acrosstheuniverse.forummotion.com/t73-favorite-quotes?highlight=quotes

...and you posted both

What did Mishima mean here when he said "another form of expression"?

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

He was an actor also, right? But he didn't need forty five years to be one. So what is he referring to?

blue moon wrote:

pinhedz wrote:Somehow we ended up with two "Favorite Quotes" threads.

http://acrosstheuniverse.forummotion.com/t73-favorite-quotes?highlight=quotes

...and you posted both

But I only repeated one of the quotes.

"If it is not possible, make it possible."
-- Svetlana