Who Said This: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”

A long time ago, I posted a collection of quotes, all of them expressing the same idea: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.

Today, I discovered a detailed article by Quote Investigator concerning those who have expressed this excellent idea.

The conclusion:

[T]he number of different people credited with this comment is so numerous that an explanatory appendix would have been required, and the letter was already too long. Here is a partial list of attributions I have seen: Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Younger, Cato, Cicero, Bill Clinton, and Benjamin Franklin. Did anybody in this group really say it? . . .

In conclusion, Blaise Pascal wrote a version of this saying in French and it quickly moved into the English language. The notion was very popular and variants of the expression have been employed by other notable figures in history. The saying has also been assigned to some prominent individuals without adequate factual support.

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Another batch of my favorite quotes

I make a habit of sharing my favorite quotes at this site. Here is another batch: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.” Howard Zinn "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." William James. “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” ― Alice Walker "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie." Russian Proverb "Thompson is equally vociferous on matters of faith. [...] "I'm an atheist; I suppose you can call me a sort of libertarian anarchist. I regard religion with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing: I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible and the Koran, and I refute them." She knows she's being controversial, but she believes passionately in what she says, and passionately believes it needs saying. "I think that the Bible as a system of moral guidance in the 21st century is insufficient, to put it mildly, she continues, frowning a little. I feel quite strongly that we need a new moral lodestone if we can't rely on what is inside our own selves. Which I think, actually, is pretty reliable." " Emma Thompson “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” ― George Orwell “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” Mark Twain “I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever's making the decision to understand that once it's pushed, it's over. Finito. They're not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won't be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn't just a dress rehearsal for something better -- but the only shot we get.”― Quentin R. Bufogle “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” Malcolm X “I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence” Malcolm X “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.” William James "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." Voltaire "I don't want to believe. I want to know." Carl Sagan "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible." Frank Zappa "It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "When I give food o the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Archbishop "I'd boycott everything Wall Street made if they actually made anything." Someecards http://www.someecards.com/ “I was a loner as a child. I had an imaginary friend -- I didn't bother with him.” George Carlin

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More quotes

This is part of my non-ending series of my favorite quotes. I'll keep publishing them as long as I keep finding new ones. The entire series is here. Here are my new favorites: "The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality." Henry David Thoreau. "Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life." —Epictetus, Greek philosopher "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex." Frank Zappa "It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Jiddu Krishnamurti "By Learning you will teach. By teaching you will learn." Latin Proverb "In the Age of Information ignorance is a choice." Facebook - attributed to Danny Miller "I have no problem paying taxes because roads don't pave themselves." I have no problem paying taxes because I'm an adult and that's part of the deal." Facebook photo of two demonstrators with signs “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis “Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.” — Glen Cook (from Sweet Silver Blues...first in the Garrett P.I. series), “Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.” Mark Twain "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) “Don’t try to tell me a loving and caring god exists. How do you explain stillbirth? What was the loving and caring plan of your god there?” Marina C (on Facebook). "Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down." Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869) "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Aesop (620 BC - 560 BC) "If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation." Tom Stoppard (1937 - ) “Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.” Ron Paul “The trouble is, you think you have time.” Buddha

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More of my favorite quotes

I've been collecting quotes for decades, and you can find hundreds of my favorites here. Here are a few that I discovered recently: "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." —Thomas Paine "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." —Nelson Mandela "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. " —Bertrand Russell “Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. -Julian Assange If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. -Julian Assange If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whose hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. -Julian Assange The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. -Julian Assange Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.” -Julian Assange Every Organization rests upon a mountain of secrets. -Julian Assange If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth." Julian Assange “The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.” -Mark Twain No man is rich enough to buy back his past. -Oscar Wilde "Science dies without the free flow of information. The same can be said of democracy." -Charles Pierce, of Esquire. “Noah’s Ark: Because the largest and most thorough act of genocide in history makes a great children’s story.” - On Facebook

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New batch of quotes

I really enjoy a good quote; it's like getting a novel in a sentence or two. Here's are some quotes that I've collected over the past couple of months. No particular topic. I hope you enjoy them: “The initial mystery that attends any journey is how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place.” Louise Bogan, Journey Around my Room "The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy." Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) “Things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they are never, ever going to get better again!” Kurt Vonnegut (at a graduation speech) (mentioned by Lawrence Krauss at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo ) To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. Voltaire (1694 - 1778) “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow "It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up." W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), "The Crack-Up" (1936) "My point in Sexual Personae is that one cannot make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography. In fact, porn permeates the high art tradition." Camille Paglia Vamps and Tramps, p. 123 "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today." Lawrence Krauss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo “A Universe from Nothing” (min 16:40) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss [More . . . ]

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