I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
-- Fran Lebowitz - “In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes.”
-- Mogens Jallberg - “The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”
-- H. L. Mencken - “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
-- Upton Sinclair - “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves to be free.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.”
-- George Jean Nathan - “There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”
-- William James - “Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
-- George Santayana - “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut - “Men have become the tools of their tools.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “No one at all will read your poems. Not because the poems are yours and you are a bad poet, but because individuality has intensified to such an extent that anything written by other people holds no interest for anyone.”
-- Soseki Natsumi - “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
-- Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) - “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.”
-- Samuel Johnson (Boswell's Life of Johnson) - “Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.”
-- Thomas Edison - “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov - “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, your tactics only aid terrorists.”
-- John Ashcroft (6 December 2001) - “It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
-- Hermann Goering (18 April 1946) - “If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged.”
-- Noam Chomsky - “Freedom without Socialism is privilege & injustice, & Socialism without freedom is slavery & brutality.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin - “Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral.”
-- Robert Orben - “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”
-- Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish") - “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.”
-- Edgar Bergen (Charlie McCarthy) - “Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
-- Robert Orben - “The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.”
-- Charles Bukowski