As I’ve often written, I love quotes. Ever since I was a pre-teen. Mini-explosions in small strings of words. A novel in a single sentence!

I collect lots of quotes and I occasionally publish my favorites in small groups on this website. If you want to see other batches, simply choose the (left side margin) “category” called “quotes.” I hope you find these fun, challenging, mind-stretching and sometimes disturbing . . .

Confusion is always the most honest response.
-Marty Indik

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-Mencken

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A cult is a religion with no political power.
-Tom Wolfe

Conceit is God’s gift to little men.
-Bruce Barton

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.
-E. M. Cioran

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
-Bertrand Russell

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
-Francious de la Rochefoucauld

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
-Crand Briton

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.
-Bacon

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
-Bierce

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.
-Howard Zinn

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
-Franz Kafka

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
-C. J. Jung

People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.
-Aldous Huxley

Slums may be the breeding ground of crime but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
-Cyril Connolly

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false; a gift confers no rights.
-Nietzsche

It is much easier for good to deal with evil than it is for good to deal
with stupidity.
-anonymous

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
-George Santayana (1863 – 1952)