favorite quotes [was:Re: Heinlein [was:[NCLUG] Sigs [was:Re: NCLUG LinkedIn Group]]]

[Tim Chambers]

DLC wrote:

> There are so many pithy utterings in the world, why is it that I can 
> never come up with one when I really need to...?

I keep mine in my PDA. Here's my collection. I keep it in alphabetical 
order. It's rather long, so I moved to the top seven quotes that caught 
my fancy tonight for those with short attention spans.

<>< Tim 1E4AF729D5CEFFD0

"There are many questions in life, but there are only three answers: 
Google, Wikipedia and eBay."
-- unknown

"We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well and live."
-- Quintus Arrius to Judah Ben Hur (movie)

"If you want to win [the Arabs'] hearts and minds, you have grab a lower 
part of their anatomy and squeeze hard."
-- Charles Krauthammer
http://tinyurl.com/5js54

"Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like 
nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills..."
-- Napoleon Dynamite

"Do not worry about your problems in mathematics. I assure you, my 
problems with mathematics are much greater than yours."
-- Albert Einstein

"Freedom spoils, and lack of freedom teaches."
-- Russian proverb

"When you drive a 'Vette, you get the kind of women who are attracted to 
guys who drive 'Vettes."
-- Jimmy Delaney in Dice Angel by Brian Rouff

===== and all the rest =====

"[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor 
between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right 
through every human heart -- and through all human hearts."
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

"A horse without a nose will never win any close races."
-- Puke & Snot show 2007

"A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like 
that of a slight bow or cursory salutation - a proof of unwillingness to 
do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something."
-- Samuel Johnson

"A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to 
be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed 
because he has been hurt."
-- G.K. Chesterton

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
-- a pseudo-quote attributed, without sufficient evidence, to Edmund 
Burke http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html

"America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound 
are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who 
live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind."
-- Norman Mailer
[guess I am one of the incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants -- tbc]

"An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. 
Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order 
to shut."
-- GK Chesterton (Illustrated London News. October 10, 1908)
http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/17.htm

"As intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them 
must increase." [NOT!]
-- FDR

"As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, 
but more mysterious."
-- Albert Schweitzer

"Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have 
to show you any stinking badges!!"
-- Gold Hat, Treasure of the Sierra Madre

"Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that 
you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong 
ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas."
-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Ch. 23

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of 
our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will rob him 
of all if he gives too much."
-- Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country

"Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye. Forget the past and you'll 
lose both eyes."
-- Russian proverb

"Every artist was first an amateur."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For us to love our country, our country must be lovely."
--  Edmund Burke

"Frequently we think we are pleasing others by our presence and we begin 
rather to displease them by the faults they find in us."
-- Thomas á Kempis

"Hitler and Holocaust ... Gulag and Dachau, torture and terror, are the 
dry-eyed children of our enlightenments."
-- Philip Rieff

"How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or 
kings can cause or cure!"
--  Samuel Johnson

"I offer no promise of a purely governmental solution for every problem."
-- Richard Nixon, 1972

"I thank Thee, Lord, for the scholarship, for the time -- and for my 
finger."
-- Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, Bishop of Shanghai, 1877-1883.  
Said as a prayer near the end of his life (d. 1906).  Paralyzed in 1883, 
he typed with one finger to complete the translation of the Bible into 
Wenli (Chinese language).  Before paralysis, he had translated it into 
Mandarin.

"If Bach is not in Heaven, I am not going!"
-- William F. Buckley

"If you have God and everything else, you have no more than having God 
only; and if you have everything else and not God you have nothing."
-- medieval mystic

"Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising 
situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway."
-- Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."
-- Andrew Jackson, 1767 - 1845

"It's not my job to come up with ideas; but it's my job to *wait* for 
the ideas to come."
-- Corky Siegel

"It is not the result that counts! It is not the result -- but the 
_spirit!_ Not _what_ -- but _how_. Not what has been attained -- but at 
what price."
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

"Let sleeping dogs lie.  Dog gone it, I'm dog tired. I'm tired of 
leading a dog's life and fighting like cats 'n dogs against cats 'n 
dogs, young pups doggin' my trail trying to become top dog.  I'm going 
to the dogs in a dog eat dog world."
-- Sheriff Wylie Burp (James Stewart) "Fivel Goes West"

"Marriage is a far better school for character than any monastery."
-- Martin Luther

"Never, in the history of the world, has a country with so much power 
used it with so much restraint. Never, in the history of the world, has 
a nation provided other nations with free goods and services while 
expecting little or nothing in return."
-- Shralper
http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_comments.php?aid=172

"On the other hand, no one can accuse us of gas chambers."
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

"One word of truth outweighs the whole world."
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecturehtml

"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is 
not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, 
mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. But amusing? Never."
-- Edna Ferber

"Profanity is the effort of a feeble mind to express itself forcefully."
-- Natalya Agar's mother
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail165.html

"Sex, politics, and religion are the three topics that dinner party 
guests are counseled to avoid if their aim is to skate safely over the 
thin ice of polite, conflict-free conversation."
-- Ken Gewertz
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1996/10.17/LetsAgreetoDisa.html

"Sit beside the river long enough and you will see the body of your 
enemy float by."
-- heard in the movie Rising Sun

"Some guys make lots of noise during sex. Not me. I'm very quiet. I'm 
just glad to be there."
-- Steve Byrne (comedian)

"Sometimes I need what only you can provide - your absence."
-- Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate 
intensity."-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

"The dictionary exists to recognize new usages created by people like me."
-- Bob Bartleby as quoted by Daniel Henninger in column 12/12/03

"The first twelve languages are always the most difficult to learn, but 
the next hundred should not pose too much of a problem."
-- James Platt, OED linguistic adviser (approximate quotation per 
Meaning of Everything, p. 211)

"The most daring crimes are often the most successful."
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it 
again on something solid."
-- GK Chesterton (Autobiography. Collected Works Vol. 16, p. 212)
http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/17.htm

"The people is lost without the Word of God, for its soul is athirst for 
the Word and for all that is good."
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
http://www.ccel.org/d/dostoevsky/karamozov/htm/book06/chapter01.html

"There is a time when we must firmly choose the course we will follow or 
the endless drift of events will make the decision for us."
-- Herbert Prochnow

"To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is above the force of 
human nature; but to learn and improve by the faults we have committed, 
is that which becomes a good and sensible man."
-- Fabius, in Plutarch's Lives
http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/fabius.html

"Unless all that we take to be knowledge is illusion, we must hold that 
in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe 
but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been 
saturated."
-- C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," in Christian Reflections

"We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by 
sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of 
a bloated Federal Establishment."
-- Ronald Reagan, 1985

"What hath God wrought?"
-- Annie Ellsworth, daugther of a friend of Samuel Morse, these are the 
first words transmitted by telegraph 5/24/1844

"Whatever else, you are certainly a rather original person."
-- duel opponent about Zosima, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Where shall the world be found, where will the word resound?  Not here, 
there is not enough silence."
--T.S. Eliot

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
-- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride