Retractions and Quotes

For those of you that have already read the post from yesterday...I removed it because I should never have posted it in the first place. I'm sure the people who run that website have the best of intentions, it just got me up in arms because holier-than-thou people have a tendency to make people run from things that could really help them. However, I am not the matauwa (religious police) and as such will not be calling out anymore religious nuts. Moving on...

I thought, since I have nothing terribly clever to post today, that I would allow a few famous people to speak for me. Here are several....okay more than several....quotes that I really enjoy.

“Wit is educated insolence.” Aristotle

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Napoleon Bonaparte

“It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one’s doubts.” G.B. Burgin

“The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anyone who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.” Jean Cocteau

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.” Abba Eban

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Albert Einstein

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Albert Einstein

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Albert Einstein

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” Benjamin Franklin

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Mahatma Gandhi

“I think it would be a good idea.” Mahatma Ghandi (when asked what he thought of Western civilization)

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” Charles de Gaulle

“Silence is argument carried out by other means.” Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” Jimi Hendrix

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” Samuel Johnson

“We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.”
Dr. Martin L. King Jr.

“Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level won’t cure.”
Ross MacDonald

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Henry Louis Mencken

“When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Friedrich Nietzche

“I am become death, shatterer of worlds.” Robert Oppenheimer (citing from the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion)

“A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood.” General G.S. Patton

“In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.” W.B. Prescott

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre

“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The power of acute observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.” George Bernard Shaw

“Men have become the tools of their tools.” H.D. Thoreau

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Last words of Pancho Villa

“I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.” Steven Wright

The remaining are all quotes from (in my opinion) one of the most quotable men in history, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

“It is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

“I have never let my schooling stand in the way of my education.”

“Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.”


“Be careful of reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; this is the principle difference between a dog and a man.”

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”

“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”

“Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its one sure defense.”

“Often it does seem a pity than Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

“The trouble isn’t that there are too many fools, but that the lightning isn’t distributed right.”

Well, that oughta do it for today - I can feel the carpal tunnel syndrome coming already!! Hope you enjoyed at least one of these quotes.