Quotes and Rants
Created | Updated May 29, 2005
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
-Mark Twain
I prefer not to quote other people; I'd rather other people quoted me.
-David Boyle
"Don't be cynical," Judge Coats said. "A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes. there'll be more wars; and soon, I don't doubt. There always have been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them. Nobody promises you a good time or an easy time. I don't know who it was who said when we think of the past we regret and when we think of the future we fear. And with reason. But no bets are off. There is the present to think of, and as long as you live there always will be."
-James Gould Cozzens
A cynic: someone who sees things as they ACTUALLY ARE, and not as how they ought to be.
-Ambrose Bierce
Common sense is what tells us that the earth is flat.
-Unknown
There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
-Percy W. Bridgeman
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.
-Heine
Death to all fanatics!
-Malaclypse the Younger
I admit no special fondness for memory in your sense of the word, which is only a clumsy way of expressing it. Whatever we come on that is great, beautiful, significant, cannot be recollected. It must from the first be evolved from within us, be made and become part of us, developed into a new and better self, and so, continuously created in us, live and operate as part of us. There is no Past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it, there is only an eternally new Now that builds and creates itself out of the elements of the Past as the Past withdraws. The true desire to bring the Past back to us must always be productive and create something new and something better.
-Goethe
We believe things when we want them to be true, but can't say for sure if they are or not.
-Jung
Belief is a form of brain damage. I have opinions, not beliefs.
-Robert Anton Wilson
I don't see why a man should despair because he doesn't see a beard on his Cosmos. If he understands that he is inside of it, not it inside of him, he knows that consciousness, purpose, significance,and ideals are amongs its possibilities, and if he surmises in vacuo that those are all finite expressions inadequate to the unimaginable, I see no more ground for despair than when a Catholic says that he does not know the thoughts and purposes of God. It is a fallacy, I think, to look to any theory for motives - we get our motives from our spontaneity - and the business of Philosophy is to show that we are not fools for doing what we want to do.
-O.W. Holmes, JR.
Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors. Luther, Mirabeau, Napolean, John Adams, Andrew Jackson.
-Emerson
Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living or to the world through its outcome.
-Bertrand Russell
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
-Freud
It is terrible to watch a man who has the incomprehensible in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God.
-Tolstoy
Fear is the mother of morality.
-Nietzsche
-Mark Twain
I prefer not to quote other people; I'd rather other people quoted me.
-David Boyle
"Don't be cynical," Judge Coats said. "A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes. there'll be more wars; and soon, I don't doubt. There always have been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them. Nobody promises you a good time or an easy time. I don't know who it was who said when we think of the past we regret and when we think of the future we fear. And with reason. But no bets are off. There is the present to think of, and as long as you live there always will be."
-James Gould Cozzens
A cynic: someone who sees things as they ACTUALLY ARE, and not as how they ought to be.
-Ambrose Bierce
Common sense is what tells us that the earth is flat.
-Unknown
There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
-Percy W. Bridgeman
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.
-Heine
Death to all fanatics!
-Malaclypse the Younger
I admit no special fondness for memory in your sense of the word, which is only a clumsy way of expressing it. Whatever we come on that is great, beautiful, significant, cannot be recollected. It must from the first be evolved from within us, be made and become part of us, developed into a new and better self, and so, continuously created in us, live and operate as part of us. There is no Past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it, there is only an eternally new Now that builds and creates itself out of the elements of the Past as the Past withdraws. The true desire to bring the Past back to us must always be productive and create something new and something better.
-Goethe
We believe things when we want them to be true, but can't say for sure if they are or not.
-Jung
Belief is a form of brain damage. I have opinions, not beliefs.
-Robert Anton Wilson
I don't see why a man should despair because he doesn't see a beard on his Cosmos. If he understands that he is inside of it, not it inside of him, he knows that consciousness, purpose, significance,and ideals are amongs its possibilities, and if he surmises in vacuo that those are all finite expressions inadequate to the unimaginable, I see no more ground for despair than when a Catholic says that he does not know the thoughts and purposes of God. It is a fallacy, I think, to look to any theory for motives - we get our motives from our spontaneity - and the business of Philosophy is to show that we are not fools for doing what we want to do.
-O.W. Holmes, JR.
Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors. Luther, Mirabeau, Napolean, John Adams, Andrew Jackson.
-Emerson
Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living or to the world through its outcome.
-Bertrand Russell
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
-Freud
It is terrible to watch a man who has the incomprehensible in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God.
-Tolstoy
Fear is the mother of morality.
-Nietzsche
