Some of My Favorite Quotes

"The first casualty of mediocrity is loneliness."  PGSW

"Marriage is the best teacher of ambivalence."  PW

"The past is a bucket of ashes."  Carl Sandburg.  (This is actually the title of a poem).

"A primrose by the river's bend, a yellow primrose was to him."  Upton Sinclair, from Oil!

"He lives in perpetual fear.  He's always on the edge of ferment, of tears, of hysteria.  And he knows he's caught.  The actual business of living has made him afraid."  Excerpt from, Will the Real Mr. Sellers Please Stand Up.  (1969).

"Baseball have a way of takin' care of itself."  Ralph Garr, former Atlanta Braves player.

"You can never completely hate someone until you first hate yourself."  PGSW

No more speed, I'm almost there."  Golden Earring, Radar Love

"The better part of valor is discretion."  Shakesphere

"A drowning man takes down those nearest."  Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

"Give me a child for the first seven years and I'll give you the man."  Jesuit Maxim, author disputed

"People tend to get on with their lives no matter what."  Paul Kligerman, the Up film series (from 56 Up)

"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."  Noah Cross, Chinatown.

"If I killed myself it would be a hate crime."  Paul Whetstone

"The rims of wounds have wounds as well."  Lucio Brock-Brodio, from her poem, Noctuary.

"God sometimes you just don't come through.  Do you need a woman to look after you?"  Tori Amos, God

"Everyone gets everything he wants.  I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one."  Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now.

"Elementary school teachers have a well-preserved and dirty little secret: some children are just no god damned good." Paul Whetstone

"When a man is finally boxed and he has no choice, he begins to decorate his box." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.

"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability." Ron White

"Water finds its own level" Repeated by Curtis Caughorn

"You can boast about anything if it's all you have.  Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast."  John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"The future's not what it used to be, Mr. Angel." Robert DeNiro to Mickey Rourke in Angelheart.

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."  Frederick Douglass, Former Slave and Abolitionist, Lecturer and Author (1817 - 1895)

"When people change direction it is a rare one who does not spend the first half of his journey looking back over his shoulder." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.

"It's better to have twelve people judge you than to have six people carry you."  Anonymous

"Why do born-again people so often make you wish that they'd never been born the first time?" Katherine Whitehorn.

"To a hammer everything else is a nail."  Anonymous

"Learn to be what you are, and resign with a good grace all that you are not." Henri Amiel

"In America you can never get too fat or too stupid." Paul Whetstone

"Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." Ambrose Bierce

"Don't sing for me. Dance for me." Anonymous

"[I]n the nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing." Jack London, Call of the Wild


"Ethical Man: A Christian holding four aces." Samuel Langhorn Clemens

"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I think that God is just." Thomas Jefferson

"A ship in the harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." John A. Shedd

"The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you don't bring Paris with you, you won't find it there." John M. Shanahan

"Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that the horses may not be stolen." Henry Louis Mencken

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Henry David Thoreau

"I don't know how to make love, but I do know how to fuck." Paul Whetstone

"Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend." Josh Billings

"How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound." Joseph Joubert

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Jonathan Swift -- This is not truly a "favorite" quote. In fact, I can readily envision the mission-minded faithful drawing upon this quotation in order to further their aims: "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because the whole world must first convert to [fill in the blanks], or "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because prayer should be part of the public curricula. In hindsight it would have been much simpler, and less taxing textually, to have simply omitted the quote from this list. It must be the first half of it that lured so comfortably in.

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine" and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Jean Jacques Rousseau.

"From very early, the oxygen of the criminal's life is to seek excitement by doing the forbidden." Stanton Samenow, Ph.D.

"I believe that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder." Werner Herzog

"It is not enough to succeed. Othes must fail." Gore Vidal.

"The value that is eventually placed upon our lives by the authors of our histories will be measured, not by the quantity of the so-called friends we made along the way, but rather upon the quality of the scalps we harvested from our enemies." Paul Whetstone

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez faire captialism than Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt . . . and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Gore Vidal

"And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense what 'wretched' means: the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims. . . ." Friedrich Nietzsche

"The most useless thing I can envision is the importance that humans place on their so-called feelings." Paul Whetstone

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson

"We are meaning-seeking creatures who invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting that give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value." Karen Armstrong

"Tradition soon becomes obligation." Paul Whetstone

"From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs." Karl Marx

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Carl Sagan

"Private property turns you in to a son of a bitch." Paul Whetstone

"A prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated theater of history." Milan Kundera

"Aim straight ahead to those you love." Jean-Luc Godard

"Ideally, if you must marry, find an only-child with dead parents." Paul Whetstone

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." Ojibwe saying.

"Humans invent the observable in order to attempt to explain the unobserveable." Unknown

"Plum her depths. Widen her shores." Paul Whetstone