December 2007

Steven Pinker Quotations

-Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. -As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. -But a conception [...]

Khaled Hosseini Quotations

-I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, [...]

James Patterson Quotations

-Always expect the unexpected. Right around Thanksgiving, when the new Alex Cross will be out. It’s called Four Blind Mice and it’s a pretty amazing story about several murders inside the military. -For many years I had heard about an underworld consisting of people who act out a vampire fantasy while I was living in [...]

Sue Grafton Quotations

-After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn’t mine to begin with. -As a writer, I sit all day, working at a word processor, reading books on auto theft, or doing telephone research. -At that point, I sat down and made an alphabetical list of all the crime [...]

Dick Clark Quotations

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law? Dick Clark

J. A. C. Brown

Anxiety leads to a narrowing of the field of attention, the so-called tunnel vision, and when people are anxious, they are unable to attend to the total situation as is necessary to enable them to act rationally, but impulsively do the first thing that comes into their heads which is usually determined by what others [...]

Cullen Hightower Quotations

-Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know. -Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it. -Wisdom is what’s left after we’ve run out of personal opinions. -People seldom become famous for what they say until after they are famous [...]

Vaclav Havel

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. Vaclav Havel

Edward Abbey Quotations

-A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. -The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real [...]

George Harrison Quotations

I think people who can truly live a life in music are telling the world, “You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give. George Harrison

John W. Gardner Quotations

-Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. -When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless. -We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. -Leaders come in many [...]

Eric Hoffer Quotations

-The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. -Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat. -The well-adjusted make poor prophets. -We lie the loudest when we lie [...]

David Oman McKay Quotations

There should be no yelling in the home unless there is a fire. David Oman McKay

Henri Frederic Amiel Quotations

-Liberty, equality – bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness. -Hope is only the love of life. -The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. -Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with [...]

Austin Phelps Quotations

-Wear the old coat and buy the new book. Austin Phelps

Daniel Webster Quotations

-A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. -The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. Daniel Webster

Albert Pike Quotations

The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is the written human speech, that gave [...]

Truman Capote Quotations

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour. Truman Capote

Richard R. Grant Quotations

The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account. Richard R. Grant

Enid Starkie Quotations

Unhurt people are not much good in the world. Enid Starkie

Samuel Smiles Quotations

Time is of no account with great thoughts. They are as fresh today as when they first passed through their author’s minds ages ago. Samuel Smiles

Caitlin Moran Quotations-

It’s not the implicit moral superiority that has made busyness so universal. After all, you could claim instant moral superiority simply by reusing a plastic bag, and we’re still being apathetic about that. No. Busyness is so popular because it’s the magic ticket to doing whatever the hell you want. You have carte blanche to [...]

Arthur Eddington Quotations

-Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. -We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. -Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the [...]

Russell P. Askue Quotations

If living conditions don’t stop improving in this country, we’re going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men. Russell P. Askue