A Collection of Quotes


These are the quotes that appear in the random quote section of my sidebar.

      "The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." - Winston Churchill
      "The only way to make temptation go away is to give in to it." - Ocsar Wilde
      "If we do not succeed, we run the risk of failure." - Dan Quayle
      "We are all of us stars and we all deserve to twinkle." - Marilyn Monroe
      "The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering." - Bruce Lee
      "Grease is the only cure for a hangover." - Cameron Diaz
      "They say marriages are made in heaven. But so is thunder and lightning." - Clint Eastwood
      "I wasn't as smart then as I am now. But who ever is?" - Tina Turner
      "Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real." - Tupac Shakur
      "Sometimes there just aren't enough rocks." - Forrest Gump
      "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." - Gandhi
      "Boredom is a great motivator." - Uma Thurman
      "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - Hunter S. Thompson
      "I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to." - Jimi Hendrix
      "I would have been a fisherman if I could, but I can't because I'm a fucking genius." - John Lennon
      "One good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain." - Bob Marley
      "Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine." - Elvis Presley
      "Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why." - Bruce Springsteen
      "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." - Mick Jagger
      "Music is the strongest form of magic." - Marilyn Manson
      "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." - Stephen Hawking
      "There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Gandhi
      "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do." - Bob Dylan
      "My one regret in life is that I'm not somebody else." - Woody Allen
      "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." - Dean Martin
      "Good judgement comes from experience. Sometimes, experience comes from bad judgement." - Christian Slater
      "Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth." - George Burns
      "A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz." - Humphrey Bogart
      "Sometimes you have to sacrifice your performance for high heels." - Gwen Stefani
      "Pink is the navy blue of India." - Diana Vreeland
      "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." - James Dean
      "Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money." - Robin Williams
      "If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
      "I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel." - Carrie Fisher
      "When it comes to luck, you make your own." - Bruce Springsteen
      "I am only young once, who cares if I'm a goofball." - Ashton Kutcher
      "The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades." - Alice Cooper
      "It's okay to be crazy, but don't be insane." - P Diddy
      "Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. "- Dave Barry
      "Yes, I do touch. I believe that everyone needs that... "- Diana Princess of Wales
      "If you can dream it, you can do it." -Walt Disney
      "It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily." - Martin Scorsese
      "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death." - Leonardo Da Vinci
      "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on. - Robert Frost
      "I'm gonna live forever, or die trying." - Joseph Heller; Catch 22
      "Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can." - Danny Kaye
      "Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away." - Tom Brokaw
      "A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny." - Buster Keaton
      "Solutions are not the answer." - Richard Nixon
      "Fish and visitors stink after three days." - Benjamin Franklin
      "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." - Pablo Picasso
      "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." - Aristotle Onassis
      "I don't try to be Captain Weird, I just do what I do." - Johnny Depp
      "It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail." - Gore Vidal
      "I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful." - Natalie Portman
      "The term 'serious actor' is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like 'Republican party' or 'airplane food'." - Johnny Depp
      "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." - Jerry Seinfeld
      "I believe that I am a molecular swerve, not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap minded." - Tom McGuane; The Bushwhacked Piano
      "Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda
      "Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation, I console myself with three thoughts: alcohol at six, dinner at eight and to be immortal you've got to be dead." - Gyles Brandeth
      "The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star." - Brillat-Savarin
      "Non-cooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet." - Julia Child
      "But when that smoking chowder came in , the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! Sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazelnuts, mixed with pounded ship's biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt... we despatched it with great expedition." - Herman Melville
      "In the vegetable world, there is nothing so innocent, so confiding in its expression, as the small green face of the freshly shelled spring pea."- William Wallace Irwin
      "While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork." - Fran Lebowitz
      "Marriage, as I have often remarked, is not merely sharing one's fettucine but sharing the burden of finding the fettucine restaurant in the first place." - Calvin Trillan
      "She sent for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petite madeleines,' which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of the pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the cake... a shudder ran through my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place." - Marcel Proust
      "When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." - Marcel Proust
      "In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece." - A. J. Leibling
      "Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili." - (alleged) dying words of Kit Carson
      "Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting." - Chaucer
      "The height of luxury was reached in the winter afternoons...lying in a tin bath in front of a coal fire, drinking tea and eating well-buttered crumpets is an experience few can have today." - J.C. Masterman
      "To eat figs off the tree in the very early morning, when they have been barely touched by the sun, is one of the exquisite pleasures of the Mediterranean." - Elizabeth David
      "When one has tasted watermelons, one knows what angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented." - Mark Twain
      "I am prepared to meet anyone. Whether anyone is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." - Mark Twain
      "I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with nursery food now that we are grown up and can have a glass of wine with it." - Elizabeth Ray
      "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today." - Lewis Carroll
      "My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked." - Winston Churchill
      "I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art." - Isadora Duncan
      "Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside." - Mark Twain
      "We are still on the chapter of peas...the impatience to eat them, the pleasures of having eaten them, the joy of having eaten them again, are the three questions which have occupied our princes for the last four days. There are ladies who, having supped with the King, go home and there eat a dish of green peas before going to bed. It is both a fashion and a madness." - Madame de Maintenon, a lady to the court of Louis XIV
      "All I ask of food is that it doesn't harm me." - Michael Palin
      "Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat." - M.F.K. Fisher
      "Had I but a penny in the world, thou shoudst have it for gingerbread." - William Shakespeare
      "Those great rock 'n' roll experiences are getting harder and harder to come by, because they have to transcend a lot of drug-induced stupor. But when they occur, they are sacred." - Pete Townsend
      "Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film." - Jack Nicholson
      "Everywhere at every time in the world, the artist has had to be a strong person in order to retain his own individuality." - Sergei Shutov
      "All my concerts had no sounds in them: they were completely silent. People had to make their own music in their minds." - Yoko Ono
      "Art is not a pastime but a priesthood." - Jean Cocteau
      "If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing." - Lillian Hellman
      "The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun." - Joan Miro
      "When uncomfortable questions are raised by art, or when it speaks with the voice of the disenfranchised, the larger audience is disturbed." - Martha Rosler
      "I used to think, I can't be mad, because nobody's put me away; therefore, I'm a genius." - John Lennon
      "A horse running has twenty legs, not four, and their movements are triangular." - the Futurists
      "Writing is a noble privilege compared with the lot of most people, who live like parts of a machine, who live only to keep the gears of society pointlessly turning." - Blaise Cendrars
      "As a woman, had I lived in ancient Greece my fantasies would never have been realized. This has dampened my interest in the Greeks, but not my fantasies." - Louise Stanley
      "I chronicle, I do not judge." - John Singer Sargent
      "I have a lover's insight or a lover's blindness for work just now. Because these colors about me are all new to me, and give me an extraordinary exaltation." - Vincent Van Gogh
      "Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time." - Marlon Brando
      "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody runs the risk of being eliminated." - Jose Ortega y Gasset
      "Over the door of the sacred tepee, they painted the flaming rainbow. It took them all day to do this, and it was beautiful." - Black Elk
      "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell by Dickens without laughing." - Oscar Wilde
      "When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift
      "Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty." - Aristotle
      "To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood." - George Santayana
      "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken
      "There is not fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." - Albert Camus
      "The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony." - Paul Goodman
      "There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - H.L. Mencken
      "Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons." - H.L. Mencken
      "In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." - H.L. Mencken
      "Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre
      "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Oscar Wilde
      "Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning." - George Bernard Shaw
      "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." - Winston Churchill
      "Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent." - John Maynard Keynes
      "I only drink to make other people seem interesting." - George Jean Nathan
      "We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them." - Evelyn Waugh
      "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." - Paul Valry
      "Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future." - Aldous Huxley
      "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever." - George Orwell
      "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." - Freidrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
      "If other people are gong to talk, conversation becomes impossible." - James McNeill Whistler
      "I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not." - Fran Leibowitz
      "The standard of intellect in politics is so low that men of moderate mental capacity have to stoop in order to reach it." - Hillaire Belloc
      "All politics are based on the indifference of the majority." - James Reston
      "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." - John Kenneth Galbraith
      "It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people." - Gore Vidal
      "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm starting to believe it." - Clarence Darrow
      "I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against." - Damon Runyon
      "I'd rather see America save her soul than her face." - Norman Mattoon Thomas, in a speech before antiwar protest, Washington, D.C. November 27, 1965
      "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." - Robert Maynard Hutchins
      "Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone." - A. Bartlett Giamatti
      "The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
      "We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want ...everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... everywhere in the world." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
      "How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone." - Coco Chanel
      "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." - Francis Scott Fitzgerald
      "Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin." - Wendell Lewis Willkie
      "The various religions are like different roads converging on the same point. What difference does it make if we follow different routes, provided we arrive at the same destination." - Mahatma Gandhi
      "Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable." - Woody Allen
      "One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." - Bertrand Russell
      "Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre
      "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very, few persons." - James Thurber
      "Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside." - George Bernard Shaw
      "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." - Abraham Lincoln
      "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers with government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." - Thomas Jefferson
      "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." - Thomas Jefferson
      "The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." - Omar Bradley
      "In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." - H.L. Menken
      "'Family' this and 'family' that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way 'states' rights' was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties". - John Waters
      "Never despise fashion. It's what we have instead of God." - Malcolm Bradbury
      "I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute." - Rebecca West
      "If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job." - Woody Allen
      "The more fonts in a document, the less content it has." - Guy Kawasaki
      "I acted vulgar; Madonna is vulgar." - Marlene Deitrich
      "Englishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described but who had never seen any." - Margaret Halsey
      "Skill without imagination is craftmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." - Tom Stoppard
      "Unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things." -Christorpher Hitchens, on George W. Bush
      "Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century." - Marshall McLuhan
      "Affluence creates poverty." - Marshall McLuhan
      "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." - Marshall McLuhan
      "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." - Marshall McLuhan
      "I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
      "I think being funny is not anyone's first choice." - Woody Allen
      "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." - Woody Allen
      "Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict." - Saul Alinsky
      "I was really lucky that I came to puberty at a time when music and politics were completely intertwined." - Bob Geldof
      "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." - Thomas Jefferson
      "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
      "Every generation needs a new revolution." - Thomas Jefferson
      "Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson
      "I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." - Thomas Jefferson
      "To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson
      "Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian." - Emma Goldman
      "Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world." - Emma Goldman
      "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman
      "Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it." - Germaine Greer
      "The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion." - Germaine Greer
      "What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine." - Germaine Greer
      "Baseball is dull only to dull minds." - Red Barber
      "No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined." - Paul Gallico
      Beware how you take away hope from another human being." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
      "The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it." - Ty Cobb
      "A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own." - H.G. Wells
      "It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun. Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today." - Barack Obama
      "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America." - Barack Obama
      "You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt." - Barack Obama
      "Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
      "We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
      "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." - John F. Kennedy
      "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
      "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Louis D. Brandeis
      "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." - Soren Kierkegaard
      "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
      "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." - Yogi Berra
      "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
      "The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - George Bernard Shaw
      "How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself." - Anais Nin
      "I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
      "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
      "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
      "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." - Frank Zappa
      "There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." - Mahatma Gandhi
      "When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
      "Wit is educated insolence." - Aristotle
      "A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." - Frank Lloyd Wright
      "You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty." - Sacha Guitry
      "Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives." - Abba Eban
      "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." - P. J. O'Rourke
      "Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." - George Bernard Shaw
      "I expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons." - Ralph Waldo Emerson