Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never did say that you can't be a nice guy and win. I said that if I was playing third base and my mother rounded third with the winning run, I'd trip her up. - Leo Durocher

Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning. -  George S. Patton

There's nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever. - Alfred Hitchcock 

When an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets - He is out of his mind! His skill has not changed. But the prize divides him. He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting - and the need to win drains him of power. - Chuang Tzu

When you are winning a war, almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise. - Winston Churchill 

The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else. - Martina Navratilova 

And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win. "But what good came of it at last?" quoth little Peterkin. "Why, that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a famous victory." -

Robert Southey, The Battle of Blenheim

Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. - Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower 

If you live long enough, you'll see every victory turn into a defeat. - Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others, 1946

Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it. - Daniel Goleman 

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat. - George Eliot,  Mr. Dempster, in Janet's Repentance, 1857.

Only the defeated and deserters go to war. - Henry David Thoreau 

Positiveness is a most absurd foible. If you are in the right, it lessens your triumph; if in the wrong, it adds shame to your defeat. - Laurence Sterne 

Has God forgotten all I have done for Him? -  attributed to Louis XIV upon hearing of the French defeat at Malplaquet, 1709

And found along the way -

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. - Alan Dean Foster, To the Vanishing Point

What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is. - Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking to the United Negro College Fund, May 9, 1989 - (reported in Esquire, 8/92 and in the NY Times, 12/9/92)

I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days. - Daniel Boone 

I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny - fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. - Margaret Chase Smith 

__________

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. - Abraham Lincoln, "Notes for a Law Lecture" July 1, 1850

COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity. - Bertrand Russell

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. - Edmund Burke, Speech on the Conciliation of America

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be. - Golda Meir 

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil. - John Ruskin 

Compromise is simply changing the question to fit the answer. - Merrit Malloy 

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy. - Phyllis McGinley 

He never wants anything but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that he wants and nothing that you want. And that's his idea of a compromise.  - Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation... is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew. - Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent. - Jimmy Carter 

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf. -  G. K. Chesterton

Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles. - Bill Watterson

Being a man is the continuing battle for one's life. One loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe. - H. Rap Brown

Once you consent to some concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they are. -  Howard Hughes

I'm a compromiser and a maneuverer. I try to get "something." That's the way our system works. - Lyndon B. Johnson

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions. - Samuel Johnson

People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you are not very clever, you should be conciliatory. - Benjamin Disraeli

__________

Andy Warhol - born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - educated at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) -

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

I am a deeply superficial person.

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

I like boring things.

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

Land really is the best art.

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

It's the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous."

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to earn how to be babies longer.

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

Lucille Ball, born August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York as Lucille Desiree Ball (never changed her name) -

Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, born August 6, 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire -

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

________

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

How indeed? He copes, like everybody else, as well as he can, that's all. And it's usually deplorably enough.

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

Carl G. Jung

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

____

Who's he?  This guy -

"Jung was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau on July 26, 1875. A very solitary introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities - a modern Swiss citizen, and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century. His father was a vicar, but, although Jung was close to both parents, he was rather disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith. Jung wanted to study archaeology at university, but his family was too poor to send him further afield than Basel, where they did not teach this subject, so instead Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel from 1894–1900. The formerly introverted student became much more lively here. Towards the end of studies here, his reading of Krafft-Ebbing persuaded him to specialise in psychiatric medicine. He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zurich. In 1906, he published The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, and later sent a copy of this book to Freud, after which a close but brief friendship between these two men followed. Dementia praecox was the name of a chronic psychotic disorder which was renamed schizophrenia by Jung's colleague at the Burgholzli, Eugen Bleuler, in an article published in 1908.

"By 1913, however, especially after Jung had published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) their theoretical ideas had diverged so sharply that the two men fell out, each suggesting that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this falling-out, Jung had some form of psychological transformative experience, exacerbated by news of the First World War, which had a dire effect on Jung even in his own neutral Switzerland. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.

"Following World War I, Jung became a worldwide traveler, facilitated by the funds he realized through book sales, honoraria, and moneys received for sabbaticals from achieving seniority in the medical institutions at which he was employed. He visited Northern Africa shortly after, and New Mexico and Kenya in the mid-1920s. In 1938, he delivered the Terry Lectures, Psychology and Religion, at Yale University. It was at about this stage in his life that Jung visited India, and while there, had dreams related to King Arthur. This convinced him that his agenda should be to pay more attention to Western spirituality, and his later writings do show deep interests in Western mystery tradition and esoteric Christianity, and especially alchemy.

"In 1903 Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, from one of the richest families in Switzerland, and together they had five children. Their marriage lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but certainly experienced emotional torments, brought about by Jung's relationships with women other than Emma. The most well-known women with whom Jung is believed to have had extramarital affairs are Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including a work showing his late interest in flying saucers. He also enjoyed a brief friendship with an English Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his controversial study of the Book of Job.

"Jung died in 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland."

___________

Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence. - James Thurber

Ah, summer - what power you have to make us suffer and like it. - Russell Baker

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing ''Embraceable You'' in spats. -  Woody Allen

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. - Sam Keen

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance. - Jane Austen

Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England. - Archibald MacLeish

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. -  Henry James

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. - Oscar Wilde

The lazy man gets round the sun as quickly as the busy one. -  R. T. Wombat

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. - Charlie McCarthy

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired. - Mortimer Caplan

I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy. - Bern Williams 

Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now. - Steven Wright 

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted. - John Lennon

The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves. - W. C. Fields

The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer. - Henry Clay

__________

Gilbert White discovered the formula for complete happiness, but he died before making the announcement, leaving it for me to do so. It is to be very busy with the unimportant.  - Alfred Edward Newton

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. - Ambrose Bierce

Most people don't know or don't accept the fact that if they had no thoughts they would be happy. - Anthony Damiani

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years. - Bertrand Russell

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. - Chang Tao-ling

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand. - Count Maurice Maeterlinck

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. - Cyril Connolly

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy. - Cythina Nelms

Happiness? That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory. - Albert Schweitzer

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy. - Eric Hoffer

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Ernest Hemingway

It's funny, this thing about happiness. It's a commodity that was imported from America in the Fifties. I see myself simply as living my life. … I feel it's pushing your luck to define how happy you are. - Francesca Annis

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. - George Burns

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop. - Gittel Hudnick

Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money. - Groucho Marx

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull. - H.L. Mencken

Success may be the ability to be happy with whatever we're stuck with. - Marilyn vos Savant

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older. - Sydney J. Harris

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously! - Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. - Woody Allen

_________

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. - Albert Camus

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. - Ignazio Silone

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. - Baruch Spinoza

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. -  Woodrow Wilson

Beer commercials are so patriotic: "Made the American Way." What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently? - Evelyn Waugh

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. - Erma Bombeck

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. - George Bernard Shaw

A politician will do anything to keep his job - even become a patriot. - William Randolph Hearst

The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. - H. L. Mencken

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings. - Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 1929

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. - Jean-Paul Sartre

After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. - Norman Thomas

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.

The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.

This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies. - Rabbi Sherwin Wine

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. - Henry George

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you. - Ramsey Clark

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation. - Søren Kierkegaard

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. - Adlai E. Stevenson

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom. - Andre Gide

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness. - Robert Frost

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond. - Jeffrey Borenstein

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches. - Will Rogers

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. - Abraham Lincoln

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, the robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C. S. Lewis

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. - Henrik Ibsen 

______

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything. - Thomas A. Edison

I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap. - Albert Einstein

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics: The exactness is a fake. - Alfred North Whitehead

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, of things without parallel. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. - Charles Darwin

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing. - Count Maurice Maeterlinck

The great obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel J. Boorstin

Knowledge is power if you know about the right person. - Ethel Mumford

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not. - Francis Bacon

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. - H. L. Mencken

If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius. - Larry Leissner

God will not suffer man to have knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity, he would be senseless. - Saint Augustine of Hippo

One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes to Watson in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about. - Oscar Wilde quotes

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world. - Margaret Mead

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not. - Jeremy Taylor

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself. - Albert Einstein

The ancient sage who concocted the maxim, Know Thyself might have added, Don't Tell Anyone! - H. F. Henrichs

 _________________

There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall, so many laws to keep you from experience. All these cities I have been in the last few weeks make me fully understand the cozy, stifling state in which most people pass through life. I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup. - Henry Rollins

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself. -  Anais Nin

A person can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees. - E. F. Schumacher

To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful. - Carl Gustav Jung

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse. - Bruce Cockburn

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. - Chuck Palahniuk

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. - Octavio Paz

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer. - Bertrand Russell

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary. - Jim Rohn

"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true." -  Franz Kafka

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me. - Dylan Thomas

I like boring things. - Andy Warhol

Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring. - Michelle Pfeiffer

Most people don't know or don't accept the fact that if they had no thoughts they would be happy. - Anthony Damiani

_________

The tendency to turn human judgments into divine commands makes religion one of the most dangerous forces in the world. - Georgia Harkness

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. - Mark Twain

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it. - Oscar Wilde

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. - Ayn Rand

It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered. - Christian Nevell Bovee

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future. - former Vice President Dan Quayle

A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards. - Karl Kraus 

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), "Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13," May 3, 1919

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. - Sun-tzu, The Art of War

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. - Evelyn Underhill

Evil is obvious only in retrospect. - Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake. - H. L. Mencken

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. - Søren Kierkegaard

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals. - William Penn

Often the fear on one evil leads us into a worse. [Souvent la peur d'un mal nous conduit dans un pire.] - Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, L'Art Poetique (I, 64)

Of evils one should choose the least. [Ex malis eligere minima oportere.] - Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), De Officiis (book III, 1)

The Evil One has left, the evil ones remain. [Den Bosen sind sie los, die Bosen sind geblieben.] - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (I, 6, 174)

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless. - W. Somerset Maugham

A victor only breeds hatred, while a defeated man lives in misery, but a man at peace within lives happily, abandoning up ideas of victory and defeat. - Buddha, Sayings of the Buddha in The Dhammapada

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. - Alan Dean Foster, To the Vanishing Point

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying. - Bertrand Russell

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. - Sir Winston Churchill

_____

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do. - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

We [Americans] are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen. - Mark Twain

I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad immoral character: like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. The turkey is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. - Benjamin Franklin

Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war. - General George S. Patton

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence. - Barbara Tuchman

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else. - Winston Churchill

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others. - Carlos Fuentes

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. - James Baldwin

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. - Sigmund Freud

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. -  A. E. Housman

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them. - Henry James

It's complicated, being an American, having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. - Louis Simpson

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth. - Charles Luckman

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. - John Updike, Problems and Other Stories

America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. - Claire Wolfe

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true. - James T. Farrell

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large. - E. M. Forster - "Impressions of the United States," in Listener, London, 4 September 1947

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see. - Andy Warhol

America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant. - Garretson Beckman "Garry" Trudeau

In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people. - Groucho Marx

I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. - Muhammad Ali, The Greatest (1975)

If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world? - Richard Nixon

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy. - Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (1965)

_____

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner. -  Italo Calvino

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys. - Max von Sydow

Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. - Frantz Fanon

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. - Bertrand Russell

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia. -  Dame Edna Everage

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world. - Francis Bacon

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference. - Søren Kierkegaard

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.  - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.  - William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. - Aung San Suu Kyi

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity. - Desmond Tutu

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. - Dom Helder Camara

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.  Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death. - Eugene V. Debs

For his birthday.  Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra, the famous former catcher and baseball manager, was born May 12, 1925.  He played almost his entire career with the Yankees and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.  He is one of only four players to be named the Most Valuable Player of the American League three times, and one of only six managers to lead both American and National League teams to the World Series. He has lived in Montclair, New Jersey since he retired.

The nickname?  That came from a friend who said he resembled a Hindu holy man (a yogi) they had seen in a movie.  That had to do with Berra sitting around with arms and legs crossed waiting to bat, or bummed out after a losing game.  Well, he turned into the "greatest all-around catcher in baseball history" although some would say that would be Johnny Bench.

There's a lot more here. 

He grew up in Saint Louis and dropped out of school in the middle of the eighth grade, but still, he was named "The Wisest Fool of the Past 50 Years" by The Economist magazine in January 2005.  He did say some odd things, even though he protested "I never said half the things I really said."

Here's some of the half he said -

• A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
• All pitchers are liars or crybabies.
• Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
• Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
• Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.
• Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
• Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.
• He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious.
• How can you think and hit at the same time?
• I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.
• I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?
• I never said most of the things I said.
• I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house.
• I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.
• I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
• If people don't want to come out to the ball park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.
• If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
• If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
• In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
• It ain't over till it's over.
• It ain't the heat, it's the humility.
• It gets late early out there.
• It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
• It's like déjà vu all over again.
• Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.
• Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
• So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.
• Take it with a grin of salt.
• The future ain't what it used to be.
• The only color I don't have is navy brown.
• The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.
• The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.
• There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em.
• We have deep depth.
• We made too many wrong mistakes.
• You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.
• You can observe a lot by just watching.
• You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.
• You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.
• If I didn't wake up, I'd still be sleeping.
• If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
• You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn't enough, in the second half, you have to give what's left.

________

The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little. - Mark Twain

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play. - Thomas Hardy

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. - Susan Sontag 

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. -  Enoch Arnold Bennett

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.  - George F. Will, The Leveling Wind

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists. - Jean Rostand (1894-1977), Journal of a Character, 1931

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.  -  Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937, founder of the Italian Communist Party

In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip. - Daniel L. Reardon

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin. - Leonard Cohen

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists. -  Don Marquis

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. - Oscar Wilde

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. - Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

The pessimist complains about the wind; The optimist expects it to change; The realist adjusts the sails. - William Arthur Ward

If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man. - Albert Camus

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.  - Elias Canetti   

You've got to take the bitter with the sour. - Samuel Goldwyn

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of England's greatest literary figures, was a poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer and some say the very finest critic of English literature.  Yeah, who cares?  Between 1747 and 1755 he wrote the first English dictionary.  Between 1779 and 1781 he wrote the ten volume "Lives of the Poets."  But everyone remembers the quotes.  He would probably think that a trifle unfair and a bit silly, but be just a little bit pleased.  Of course you should read his major works, or not.  Those times, when people read essays on the nature of man and carefully crafted moral poetry, have passed.

But some of what he wrote persists.  The standard reference for the quotes, with almost two thousand of them, is here and most everything you'd want to know about the man is here, with most of the quotes here by source.

Avoiding those already cited in these pages, and the ones everyone knows, here is a curious collection of what he was saying.

-          Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

-          A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.

-          A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.

-          Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

-          As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

-          Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

-          Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

-          If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.

-          If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.

-          In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

-          It is better to live rich than to die rich.

-          Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

-          People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

-          Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

-          The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

-          There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

-          We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

-          When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

-          Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

-          Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.

-          Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

-          Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

-          There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

-          You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid. 

-          Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

-          He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great. 

-          I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

-          Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.

___

I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. - Katherine Graham

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state. - Cardinal Richelieu

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. - Lord Acton

There are some occasions when a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest. - Lord Chesterfield (Philip Stanhope)

Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets; for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say. - Sir Henry Taylor

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them. - Charles Caleb Colton

Of course I can keep secrets. It's the people I tell them to that can't keep them. - Anthony Haden-Guest

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. - John LeCarre

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly. - Samuel Johnson

I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret. - Walter Winchell

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses. - George Bernard Shaw, "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (1893), act III

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people. - W. H. Auden

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted. - Don DeLillo

Don't you think that any secret course is an unworthy one? - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. - William T. Sherman

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against. - Thomas Carlyle

The worst of rebels never arm / To do their king or country harm, / But draw their swords to do them good, / As doctors cure by letting blood. - Samuel Butler 

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence. - Albert Camus

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us. - Albert Camus 

In the fight between you and the world, back the world. - Frank Zappa

Certainty - When one is mistaken at the top of one's voice. - Ambrose Bierce

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe. - Lord Salisbury 

I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep. - Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord 

The Army has carried the American … ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. - Tom Lehrer 

Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact. - Sun Tzu 

It is respectable to have illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull. - Joseph Conrad

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. - Rabindranath Tagore

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. - Oscar Wilde quotes

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions. - Albert Einstein

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say. - Henry Miller

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted. - Arthur Miller

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. - Cyril Connolly 

The great obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel J. Boorstin 

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. - Woody Allen 

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays. - Aldous Huxley 

Become a mystic. Help stamp out reality. - Charles S. Milligan 

In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong … reality is frequently inaccurate. - Douglas Adams 

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it. - Garrison Keillor 

Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it. - Jack Wagner

I like reality. It tastes of bread. - Jean Anouilh 

I feel not unlike a small boy, waking from a bad dream to find reality not much of an improvement. - John Byrne 

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. - Lily Tomlin 

It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind. - Roy Blount 

If you're interested in misery, 1 - always try to look good in front of others; 2 - always live in a world of assumptions and treat each assumption as though it's a reality; 3 - relate to every new situation as if it is a small crisis; 4 - always live in the future or the past; and 5 - occasionally stomp on yourself for being so dumb as to follow the first four rules.  - W. W. Broadbent (Professor of Psychiatry at the USC Medical Center) 

Man knows much more than he understands. - Alfred Adler

I don't understand you. You don't understand me. What else do we have in common? - Ashleigh Brilliant 

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. - Abraham Lincoln

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it. - Albert Einstein

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness. - Alfred North Whitehead

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. - Benjamin Franklin

Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome. - Benjamin Whichcote

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. - James Baldwin

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven. - Mark Twain

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is. - Mohandas K. Gandhi

Did Saint Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. - Rebecca West

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. - Richard Francis Burton

The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride. - Henry Louis Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, 1917

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh. - Robert A. Heinlein

All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays. - Cathy Ladman

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

On the lighter side –

I'm Jewish. I don't work out. If God had wanted us to bend over, He would have put diamonds on the floor. - Joan Rivers

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself. - Peter O'Toole

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. - Emo Philips

In the beginning there was nothing and God said "Let there be light," and there was still nothing but everybody could see it. - Dave Thomas

God is love, but get it in writing. - Gypsy Rose Lee.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. - George Bernard Shaw

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.  - Maureen Reagan

Your lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. I know this because I worked alongside them, gone bowling with them, watched them pass me over for promotions time and again. And I say... This stinks! - Dan Castellaneta as the voice of Homer Simpson

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence. – the famous Napoleon Bonaparte quote

A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while on the contrary an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops. - John J. Pershing

Obscurity and competence - that is the life that is best worth living. - Mark Twain

I don't have time to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent. - Curtis Le May

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, and those in cemeteries. - Everett McKinley Dirksen

To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt. - Samuel Johnson

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong. - Charles Kettering

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. - David Friedman

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. - General Douglas MacArthur

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. - W. C. Fields

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

If you're going through hell, keep going. - Winston Churchill

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith

The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one. - William H. Seward

Stubbornness does have its helpful features.  You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow. - Glen Beaman

Mingle a little folly with your wisdom; a little nonsense now and then is pleasant. - Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Carmina (IV, 12, 27) –[Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem: Dulce est desipere in loco.]

No one is exempt from taking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly. - Michael Eyquen de Montaigne, Essays (Book III, Chapter I)

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance. - Aldous Huxley

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action. -  Bertrand Russell 

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense. - Robert Frost 

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others. - Samuel Butler

The learned fool writes nonsense in better language that the unlearned - but it's still nonsense. - Benjamin Franklin

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. - John Kenneth Galbraith

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. - Carl G. Jung

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. - Salvador Dali

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. - Ray Bradbury 

Totally mad. Utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense. - Douglas Adams

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Posted the day the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences presents the Academy Awards, the Oscars, at the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.  Arts and sciences?  Well, maybe.  A collection of previously published quotes on the event, and the setting -

It's a scientific fact. For every year a person lives in Hollywood, they lose two points of their IQ. - Truman Capote

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. - Fred Allen

I've been asked if I ever get the DT's.  I don't know; it's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DT's begin.  - W. C. Fields

Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.  - Ben Hecth

In Hollywood if a guy's wife looks like a new woman – she probably is.  - Dean Martin.

A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.  - S. J. Perelman

The most famous one –

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath. - Oscar Levant

And these –

Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors. - Walter Winchell

Ever since they found out that Lassie was a boy, the public has believed the worst about Hollywood. - Groucho Marx

Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom. - Candice Bergen

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing. - Michelangelo Antonioni

You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well. - Carrie Fisher

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read; if they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing. - Will Rogers

It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there. - Will Rogers

I just want to tell y'all not to worry - them people in New York and Hollywood are not going to change me none. - Elvis Presley

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. - Andy Warhol

The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I left its suburbs headed towards Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide. - S.J. Perelman

There is a theory that almost anything that's fun is going to be ruined sooner or later by people from California. They tend to bring seriousness to subjects that don't deserve it, and they tend to get very good at things that weren't very important in the first place. - Calvin Trillin

On film…

Jean-Luc Godard:

• Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
• A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.

Samuel Goldwyn: Give me a couple of years, and I'll make that actress an overnight success.
 

Alfred Hitchcock: The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

Will Rogers: The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

Andy Warhol: It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see.
 

Billy Wilder:  Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
 

Katharine Hepburn: The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Raymond Chandler: The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

George Lucas, in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded: get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.

____________