OT: Repository of quotations

[Renegade 13]

Over the years, I've come across a lot of quotes that I like, whether because they're humorous, accurate, or profound. So, I'm making this thread for sharing any and all quotes that you've come across that you like, for whatever reason. I'll start off with a few of mine:

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes, courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says, "I'll try again tomorrow"."

"Maturity is knowing you were an idiot in the past. Wisdom is knowing you'll be an idiot in the future."

"It's not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we'll have."

"One of humanity's greatest mistakes is failing to act when we know we should. For this leads only to regrets, and constant worry of what might have been."

[Randallw]

A particularly favourite quote of mine is from a book I read. I use it as my sig on another forum.

"You are who you are because of where you come from, Captain Ventris, so do not presume to judge me by your own standards....until I was chosen to become one of the Emperor's warriors, I knew neither sunlight nor joy.....I have since seen the sun, yet still I know no joy"

I also like a Latin phrase I figured out

"Dulce et decorum est pro frateri mori".

[AgentZero]

A few favourites of mine:


"There is no innocence in my court. A plea of innocent is guilty of wasting my time!"

"Light travels faster than sound, which is why most people look bright until they open their mouth."

"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing."

"It's not that I hate you, it's just you have delicious cranial fluids."

And of course: "Burn, heretic."

And I wouldn't be Irish if I didn't mention that walking quote-factory of ours, Oscar Wilde.

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." (zing!)

"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."

"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"I am not young enough to know everything."

"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." (oh snap!

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow."

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself."

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity."

"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."

"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."

"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."

Yes, that's a copy pasta from AZ's Big List of Oscar Wilde Quotes. Yes, it is alphabetized. I'll let someone else get a post in edgewise before I go so far as to post the Big List of Oscar Wilde Quotes From His Books.

[Randallw]

I quite like this example of judicial poetry

"Time will pass and seasons will come and go; Spring with its wavin' green grass and heaps of sweet-smellin' flowers on every hill and in every dale. Then will come sultry Summer, with her shimmerin' heat-waves on the baked horizon; and Fall, with her yeller harvest-moon and the hills growin' brown and golden under a sinkin' sun; and finally Winter, with its bitin', whinin' wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. But you won't be here to see any of 'em, Carlos Robles; not by a dam' sight, because it's the order of this court that you be took to the nearest tree and hanged by the neck till you're dead, dead, dead, you olive colored son-of-a-billy-goat!"

I realise I may stretch somewhat the understanding of the term "quote"

I have in my possesion a rather elderly Pocket Book of Quotations (though it would, as do I towards quotes, stretch them somewhat). I have leafed through and have found a section on puns, and who am I to argue with the appropriateness,

We wanted Li Wang
But we winged Willie Wong
A sad but excusable
Slip of the Tong.
-Keith Preston (whomever that is)

[Xrati]

That would classify as a passage. You should put it to music though...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

'Freedom of religion'

[Slick]

"There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those who understand binary math, and those who don't."

"Why are you ducking? They couldn't hit an elephant at this range" Last words of General Sedgwick, Union army, American Civil War.

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."



And some favorites from my personal life:


"Half of one, six dozen of another... makes no difference."

"Don't try to tell me that my kid doesn't need a visa to go to school in Hawaii! Hawaii is NOT one of the 52 states."

"This can't be a real driver's liscence. Hawaii is kind of like Disneyland, nobody actually LIVES there."

"When Mr. _____ asks me to do something, I gladly do it because I still feel guilty about putting his son in the garbage can so many times when I was in intermediate school."

"I was driving my sister's car. It burns a lot of oil, so she keeps a case of oil in the trunk. I'm late because I had to pull off the road and put some more oil in the engine. It sure took a long time and I spilled a lot on the road." ... "You didn't try to pour it down the dipstick hole, did you?" ... "How else do you add it?"

[narf poit chez BOOM]

"There are two great ways to end a game of Lemmings...One is getting all your lemmings to the end. The second is the nuke button." - Me, just now.

[Baron Munchausen]

Ah, but I've been collecting for years. I'd have to upload my quotes collection as a file, it'd be too much for a message. So, what are you looking for? Literary quotes? Political quotes? Humor quotes? Science quotes?

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
-- H. L. Mencken

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken

"I will not let school stand in the way of my education."
-- Mark Twain

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
-- Mark Twain

"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."
-- Mark Twain

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. -- Samuel Johnson

Fascists divide in two categories: the fascists and the anti-fascists. -- Ennio Flaiano

All I know is that I am not a Marxist. -- Karl Marx

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
-- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
-- Adolf Hitler

"The jawbone of an *** is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Samson's time." -- Richard Nixon

"Television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy." -- Richard Nixon

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." -- Ronald Reagan

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."
-- P. J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991)

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."
-- P. J. O'Rourke

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P.J. O'Rourke

Giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P.J. O'Rourke

"Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex."
-- Frank Zappa

"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced."
-- Frank Zappa

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
-- Karl Popper (b. 1902), Quoted in: Observer (London, 1 Aug. 1982).

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
-- Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science"

"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it" - Florence Ambrose

“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose." -- J. B. S. Haldane in "Possible Worlds: And Other Essays" [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.286. Emphasis in the original.

Science has “explained” nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), Along the Road, pt. 2, “Views of Holland” (1925).

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan (Cosmos, p. 31)

[Renegade 13]

Baron Munchausen said:
So, what are you looking for?

To be honest, any and all that you're willing to share