“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.”
Gail Godwin (1937) Novelist, short story writer
“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.”
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land
Last update June 3, 2021. History
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Robert A. Heinlein557
American science fiction author 1907–1988Related quotes
“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher
As attributed in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 624
“Delirium, dream, death—Three-D. What was the fourth?”
Justina Robson book Natural History
Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 3 “Uluru” (p. 45)
“Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.”
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools
Source: Literature and Dogma (1873), Ch. 1
“To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer
Disme: the Art of Tenths, Or, Decimall Arithmetike (1608)
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Last words (Jefferson died on 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence)
A few accounts declare that he asked on the night of the third: "Is it the fourth?" Most accounts declare the cited words were his last, and that he died a few hours before John Adams, whose last words are reported to have been: "Thomas — Jefferson — still surv — " or "Thomas Jefferson still survives.".
1820s
“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.”
Barbara Walters (1929) American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality
Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually coined by Stan Barstow.
Misattributed