Likharev
ON QUOTATIONS
A short saying oft contains much wisdom.
- Sophocles
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Sir Winston Churchill
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
- Dorothy L. Sayers
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
- W. Somerset Maugham
He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
- Rudyard Kipling
Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.
- Edward Young
The point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting.
- Amanda Cross
Misquotation is the pride and privilege of the learned.
- Hesketh Pearson
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
- Ambrose Bierce
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
- Robert Benchley
There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
- Charles M. Schulz [Sure, bumper stickers are readable. – KKL]
A witty saying proves nothing.
- Voltaire
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
- Don Herold
Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
- Friedrich von Schiller
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
- Anatole France
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
- G. K. Chesterton
The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
- Jane Wagner
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
- Aesop
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
- Mark Twain
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
- Sir Winston Churchill
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to
the Internet, we know that is not true.
- Robert Wilensky
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
- C. S. Lewis
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
- Frank Leahy
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
- Georges Duhamel
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
- Jules Renard
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
- Paul Valery
Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
- Woody Allen
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
- Voltaire
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
- G. K. Chesterton
I'm a born-again atheist.
- Gore Vidal
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of
them.
- H. L. Mencken
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
- Oscar Wilde
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a
sober one.
- George Bernard Shaw
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people
to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
- Joseph Conrad
It is bad luck to be superstitious.
- Andrew W. Mathis
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
- Abraham Lincoln
You know you’ve achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to
take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
- Noelie Altito
Get the facts, or the facts will get you.
- Thomas Fuller
The truth is more important than the facts.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
- Alfred North Whitehead
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
- Andre Gide
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
- Bertrand Russell
It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.
- Malcolm Forbes
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
- Henry J. Tillman
In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
- Johann von Neumann
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are
saying is true.
- Bertrand Russell
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the
physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
- Vannevar Bush
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.
- Frank Wilczek
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
- E. W. Dijkstra
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
- Patrick Young
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Sir Winston Churchill
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
- Alfred A. Knopf
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
- George Eliot
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
- John Gaule
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
- Richard Feynman
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor
2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2.
- Grabel's Law
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
- Michael Crichton
No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.
- Donald Foster
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
ON EDUCATION
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole
week.
- Evan Esar
Education is what survives when what had been learned has been forgotten.
- B. F. Skinner
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
- Laurence J. Peter
Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
- G. M. Trevelyan
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to
be done, whether you like it or not.
ON SPEACH
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
- John Andrew Holmes
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
- Soren Kierkegaard
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
- Dame Rose Macaulay
What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.
- Hansell B. Duckett
Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much.
- John Wayne
The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as
possible.
- George Burns
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
- Will Durant
ON WRITING
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a
book.
- Edward Gibbon
After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
- George Ade
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
- Charles de Montesquieu
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
- Bobby Knight
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
- Russel Lynes
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
- Fred Allen
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too
famous.
- Robert Benchley
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
- Robert Heinlein
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
- Daphne du Maurier
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
- Walter Bagehot
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
- Samuel Johnson
This book fills a much-needed gap.
- Moses Hadas
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's
many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
- Flannery O'Connor
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
- Josh Billings
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
- George Bernard Shaw
Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff
into it.
- David Sedaris
Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
- Philip Guedalla
Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
- Fran Lebowitz
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Thomas Mann
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
- Leo Rosten
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
- Jules Renard
The fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
- Sir Winston Churchill
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
- Stephen King
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
- Samuel Johnson
Most people ignore most poetry because
most poetry ignores most people.
- Adrian Mitchell
A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
- Henry Fielding
For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.
- Gloria Borger
ON ARTS
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
- Andre Gide
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
- Paul Gauguin
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination
without skill gives us modern art.
- Tom Stoppard
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
- Samuel Johnson [Seems strange now, but SJ evidently meant the music of his time, now called classical music – KKL]
I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
- Howard Dietz
A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't.
- Unknown
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
- Ed Gardner
If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.
- Pierre Beaumarchais
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- Edgar Wilson Nye
Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
- Mel Brooks
All television is children's television.
- Richard P. Adler
Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
- Ann Landers
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people
want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
- Clive Barnes [This is even more applicable to the Internet. – KKL]
ON HUMAN CONDITION
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
- Don Marquis
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have
created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
- Stephen Hawking
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
- Henry Adams
You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.
- Scott Adams
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
- Bertrand Russell
Humankind cannot stand very much reality.
- T. S. Eliot
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
- Edith Sitwell
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
- H. L. Mencken
The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
- Jane Wagner
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- Aldous Huxley
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are
those who try to tell them the truth.
- H. L. Mencken
I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
- Harry S. Truman
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
- Don Marquis
A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
- Don Marquis
Stoop and you'll be stepped on; stand tall and you'll be shot at.
- Carlos A. Urbizo
Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
- H. Mumford Jones
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
- George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
- Philip K. Dick
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with
which the ill-fated creature is born.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment.
Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer
ON MONEY
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
- Honore de Balzac
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
- William Jennings Bryan
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
- Dorothy Parker
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
- Robert W. Sarnoff
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
- Mark Twain
As long as people accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
- Dick Cavett
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
- Aristotle
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
- John Maynard Keynes
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
- Henry David Thoreau
There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
- Edmund Wilson
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
- W. Somerset Maugham
A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both
commonly succeed.
- H. L. Mencken
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
- Aldous Huxley
When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.
- W. S. Gilbert
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
- G. K. Chesterton
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what
sounded good.
- Thomas Sowell
A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment.
- Willis Player
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.
- Alfred E. Wiggam
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
- Oscar Levant
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough
to rule others.
- Edward Abbey
The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism.
- Norman Brenner
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing.
- Nancy Astor
All movements go too far.
- Bertrand Russell
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
- Daniel Webster
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
- Hannah Arendt
The world is run by 'C' students.
- Al McGuire
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
- Frank Dane
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
- Aesop
I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public
office.
- H. L. Mencken
I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
- Victor Hugo
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
- P. J. O'Rourke
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
- Simon Cameron
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
- Larry Hardiman
The State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
- Will Rogers
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
- Eugene McCarthy
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
- Robert Copeland
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
- John F. Kennedy
Washington is the only place where sound travels faster than light.
- C. V. R. Thompson
He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have.
- Don Juan Manuel
One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.
- Andrew Carnegie [perhaps the most famous American philanthropist – KKL]
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
- Herbert Spencer
A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
- William Ralph Inge
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
- Voltaire
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
- Will Rogers
Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
- Henrik Tikkanen
ON ATTITUDES
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
- Herm Albright
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- Oscar Wilde
Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
- Sam Brown
Never answer a critic, unless he's right.
- Bernard M. Baruch
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
- Oscar Wilde
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
- Agatha Christie
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
- Jean Cocteau
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
- Olin Miller
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other
people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah,
there you are.'
- Frederick L Collins
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.
- James Russell Lowell
The average person thinks he isn't.
- Father Larry Lorenzoni
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
- Jascha Heifetz
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
- Henry Kissinger
Adventure is just bad planning.
- Roald Amundsen
Reality is something you rise above.
- Liza Minnelli
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
- Jean Kerr
Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
- W. C. Fields
Blame someone else and get on with your life.
- Alan Woods
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.
- Margaret Mitchell
When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.
- Al Franken
The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
- Walter Bagehot
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
- Harold Wilson
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
- Walter Bagehot
It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
- Carl Sagan
Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.
- Frantz Fanon
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Men who never get carried away should be.
- Malcolm Forbes
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.
- Mario Andretti [a famous race car driver. – KKL]
***
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery
A book of quotations can never be complete.
- Robert M. Hamilton
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
- George Saunders [His hero’s last words. - KKL]