A good quote is a novel in a sentence or two. That’s good payback for impatient people like me, who struggle to sit still long enough to read entire novels. I make a point of collecting engaging quotes wherever I read them, though, and I’ve published more than 100 groups of quotes over the years here at DI. This group includes quotes originated by two of my friends, Andy Wahl and Dale Irwin. Here’s the latest batch from my collection:
“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
― Carl Sagan
When you add it all up, it’s not uncommon for a single child to cost a normal, middle-class family something like $1.1 million, from birth through the undergrad years. To get some perspective, the median price of a home in 2008 was $180,100. It is commonly said that buying a house is the biggest purchase most Americans will ever make. Having a baby is like buying six houses. Except that they don’t increase in value, you can’t sell them and after 16 years they’ll probably say they hate you.
Jonathan Last – Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203917304574413792994350108
“Do the next right thing.”
– Dale Irwin (Kansas City Consumer Attorney, explaining his business model).
Psychological discernment is not as difficult as one might think: Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear soon become convinced that mortals cannot keep a secret. He whose lips are sealed talks with his fingertips; disclosure oozes out of his every pore.
– Sigmund Freud “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria,” (1901-5), VI, 148
“Knowledge is learning something new every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.”
– ZEN PROVERB
You can look the other way once, and it’s no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time, and pretty soon that’s all you’re doing; compromising, because that’s the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren’t, they weren’t bad guys. They were just like you and me. Except they compromised… Once.
Jack Bauer – From the opening episode of “24,” Season One.
“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”
― Nikola Tesla
“I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
– Paulo Coelho
“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Adventure is just bad planning.”
Roald Amundsen
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
– Clarence Darrow
“I don’t care that they stole my idea. I care that they don’t have any of their own.”
~ Nikola Tesla
“If I were an extraterrestrial taxonomist surveying Earth, it would be a very short summary: This planet has one form of life, DNA, with many phenotypes.”
– Andy Wahl
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: How I Got Licked
“The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.”
– Mencius
“Many People Die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
– Jim Rohn
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
– Mark Twain
Given unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy.
Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms–elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest–will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. [(re: “manufacture of consent”–ed)] All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial–but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
How can we control the vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? On the verbal level and in general terms, the question may be answered with the utmost ease. Consider the problem of over-population…
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, Chapter XII. What can Be Done? (…) p.110
