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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 12:23:47 GMT -5
By now everyone must know that I'm a quotation freak and collector. So, of course, I'm going to have to have a thead here for them too.
Please feel free to add your own favorites--one request--please give the source for the quotations.
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:17:27 GMT -5
QUOTES OF THE DAY Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born at Horse Cave Creek, Ohio on 24 June in 1842. He joined the Union army in 1862, rising from first lieutenant to brevet major by the time he left the army in 1867 and took up journalism. He was a deft satirist, which earned him the name "Bitter" Bierce, his precise spare use of the language is a delight to quote collectors. He disappeared into Mexico in 1913 with the intention of joining Pancho Villa's revolutionaries. One part of the Bierce corpus that I won't dip into this time is the Devil's Dictionary, a feature of his newspaper column between 1881 and 1906 and then published in book form.
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."
"Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify."
"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret."
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over."
"While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands, you are safe, for you can watch both his."
"Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate."
"It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better."
"Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of."
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:20:19 GMT -5
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. - Charles A. Beard, 1874 - 1948
It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever. - Daniel Webster, eulogy for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, 2 August 1826
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. - George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. - Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 - 1968
I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.' - George Carlin, 1937 - 2008
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:23:08 GMT -5
Quote of the Day Jean Cocteau was born at Maisons-Laffitte, France on 5 July in 1889 into a prominent Parisian family that exposed him to music, opera, painting, and literature at an early age. He considered himself a poet, publishing his first volume at nineteen. He drove a Red Cross ambulance during WW I and in addition to twenty volumes of poems he wrote five novels, twenty plays, six screenplays, the dialogue for three more films, and directed ten movies.
"Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."
"The extreme limit of wisdom — that is what the public calls madness."
"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody 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."
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
"Respect movements, flee schools."
"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like — then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:29:57 GMT -5
Mardy Grothe coined the term "Neverisms" for those urgent words of wit, wisdom, and advice that tell you what you should never do, never say, never ignore, and never forget. Never miss one of Mardy's gems!
QUOTES:
"Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done." - Aaron Burr, 1756 - 1836
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." - Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955
"Never let the fear of striking out get in your way." - Babe Ruth, 1895 - 1948
"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1804 - 1881
"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be." - Clementine Paddleford, 1898 - 1967
"Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river." - Cordell Hull, 1871 - 1955
"Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals." - Cynthia Heimel
"Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies won't believe you anyway." - Elbert Hubbard, 1856 - 1915
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:30:55 GMT -5
I sorry for posting so many quotes but there are ones I'm afraid of losing whenever MSN decides to take the board down.
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:43:15 GMT -5
Quotes of the Day:
"Eloquence lies as much in the tone of the voice, in the eyes, and in the speaker's manner, as in his choice of words." - François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 1613 - 1680
"Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice." - William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616
"Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844 - 1900
"It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other." - Edward R. Murrow, 1908 - 1965
"It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans." - Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805
"Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think - in a deeper voice." - Bill Cosby
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:46:23 GMT -5
Father's Day Quotes:
"Society moves by some degree of parricide, by which the children, on the whole, kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs. This is what progress is." - Isaiah Berlin, 1909 - 1997
"What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity." - Jean Paul, 1763 - 1825
"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week." - Mario Cuomo
"A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty." - Miguel de Cervantes, 1547 - 1616
"It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons." - Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805
Some authority on parenting once said, 'Hold them very close and then let them go.' This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in)." - Bill Cosby
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Post by Miss Who on Jul 18, 2011 14:47:49 GMT -5
Hi Peg, would it be possible for you to sart your today in history thread in here? I don't know about anyone else, But I loved it.
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 18, 2011 14:50:14 GMT -5
First Day of Summer:
With impressive regularity, the seasons roll along. At 21:17 UTC (GMT to us old-timers, which is 2:17 p.m. PDT, 5:17 p.m. EDT) today the earth marks the solstice, the start of Summer in the northern hemisphere, the start of Winter in the southern. Here are some thoughts on Seasons, with an attempt to address the coming season no matter where you receive this.
"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." - George Santayana, 1863 - 1952
"The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer." - Henry Beston.
"Winter is not a season, it's an occupation." - Sinclair Lewis, 1885 - 1951
"Snow endures but for a season, and joy comes with the morning." - Marcus Aurelius, 121 - 180
"No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold." - Joseph Campbell, 1904 - 1987
"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken." - James Dent
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 19, 2011 15:02:36 GMT -5
who--I have started it here. And I very glad that you enjoy it. Sus does to, she often makes comments on something event and I hope you will too.
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 19, 2011 15:18:22 GMT -5
"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full, the pessimist, half-empty, and the engineer wil tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be." -- Anonymous. "We are an imossibililty in an imossible universe." -- Ray Bradbury, sci-fi author (b. 1920) "Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible." -- Doug Larson, newspaper columnist (b. 1926)
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 20, 2011 9:09:35 GMT -5
"We may well go to the moon, but that's not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us." -- Charles de Gaulle, French statesman (1890-1970) "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." -- Flannery O'Connor, author (1925-1964) "People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be." -- Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the US (1809-1865)
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 20, 2011 9:47:51 GMT -5
Rebecca Nurse. Susannah Martin. Elizabeth Howe. Sarah Good. Sarah Wildes. Five good women of Salem Village (now Danvers) and Salem, Masachusetts, accused of witchcraft in hysteria amid a community feud, were hanged at Salem on 19 July in 1692. Their bodies were immediately dumped in a shallow grave without benefit of Christian rites. By the autumnal equinox a total of nineteen women had been hanged, three died in jail, and one man was pressed with heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea and stand trial. The hysteria waned, but it took twenty years before all the convictions were overturned, compensation was paid to the victims' families, and excommunications were vacated.
"There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet (1772-1834)
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free "speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." - Louis Brandeis, Suprem Court Justice (1856-1941)
"Such progress we have made! In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me as a witch, but now they are content to burn my book." - Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychoanalyst (1856-1939)
"It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism." - H. L. Mencken, journalist & writer (1880-1956)
"There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong." - Edward R. Murrow, CBS newsman (1908-1965)
"Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it's called golf." - Will Rogers, humorist (1879-1935)
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 20, 2011 9:52:57 GMT -5
Mary Jessamyn West was born in Jennings County, Indi. on 18 July in 1902. Her Quaker family moved to Yorba Linda, Calif. in 1909 and she got a degree in English from Whittier College in 1923. While working on her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1933 she was diagnosed as having terminal tuberculosis and spent two years in a sanitarium before being sent home to die. In 1945 she had recovered, but during her long convalescence her mother told her stories of the Indiana farm country and Jessamyn began to write. Most of her short stories and novels deal with Quaker characters and families in Indiana, but these excerpts are more universal.
"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions."
"How can you tell whether or not you have had enough until you've had a little too much?"
"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future."
"A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself."
"Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary."
"The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate."
"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 20, 2011 9:59:14 GMT -5
"I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived." - Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970)
"I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail — sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it — but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, physician (1809-1894)
"My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for 40 years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions." - Elayne Boosler, comedienne
"You have to live spherically—in many directions. To accept yourself for what you are without inhibitions, to be open." - Federico Fellini, Italian filmmaker (1920-1993)
"There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost." - Franz Kafka, Czech writer (1883-1924)
"There has been a lot of progress during my lifetime, but I'm afraid it's heading in the wrong direction." - Ogden Nash, humorist poet (1902-1971)
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 21, 2011 11:26:05 GMT -5
"We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that corresond with them." -- Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, US President (1744-1818) "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill, British statesman (1874-1965) "Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -- Gertrude Stein, author (1874-1946)
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 22, 2011 7:58:44 GMT -5
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 22, 2011 8:46:02 GMT -5
Tom Robbins was born at Blowing Rock, N.C. on this day in 1936. He started telling stories when he was five, dictating some of them to his mother. He was thrown out of Washington and Lee University after two years, hitchhiked around the US, and landed in New York's Greenwich Village where he was drafted near the end of the Korean War. He joined the US Air Force, studied meteorology, and taught it to the Korean Air Force. He moved to Virginia, studied art, worked as a copy editor for the Richmond News-Dispatch, and moved to Seattle in 1962, apparently for the weather. His first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, was a cult hit, he followed with eight more.
QUOTES: "Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy."
"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak."
"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
"Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue."
"The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict."
"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."
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Post by Flying Horse on Jul 23, 2011 8:17:33 GMT -5
Thought of the day: "There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference." -- Juan Montalvo, Ecuadorean political writer (1832-89) Quote of the Day: "Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men." -- Kin Hubbard, humorist (1868-1930) Quote of the Moment: "Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything." -- Kurt Vonngut, author (1922-2007)
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