House Rules
“If I could do it all again, I'd be a plumber.”
“If I could do it all again, I'd be a farmer.”
Mobutu to his national security advisor, Honoré Ngbanda, "the Terminator". Meredith, p. 532
“I think if I had my life to live over again, I'd do things a little different.”
Statement made in 1961, as quoted in Voices from Cooperstown : Baseball's Hall of Famers Tell It Like It Was (1998) by Anthony J. Connor, p. 286
Context: I think if I had my life to live over again, I'd do things a little different. I was aggressive, perhaps too aggressive. Maybe I went too far. I always had to be right in any argument I was in, I always had to be first in everything. I do indeed think I would have done some things different. And if I had I believe I would have had more friends.
You Are, co-written with Brenda Harvey Richie.
Song lyrics, Lionel Richie (1982)
Source: November 2021 per Mark Richards per 20 November 2021 article from Insider https://www.insider.com/kyle-rittenhouse-wishes-didnt-have-to-do-it-lawyer-says-2021-11
“Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?”
Oscar Levant, as recounted by Levant in A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); quoted in "Books and Things" by Lewis Gannett, in The New York Herald Tribune (January 13, 1940), p. 11
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
Brown did include this quote in her book Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68, but it appears she was just paraphrasing a quote that had already been written elsewhere. The earliest known appearance of a similar quote is the "approval version" of the Narcotics Anonymous "Basic Text" released in November 1981, which included the quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results." A PDF scan of the 1981 approval version can be found here http://www.nauca.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1981-11-Basic-Text-Approval-Form-White.pdf, with the quote appearing on p. 11 (p. 25 of the PDF), at the end of the fourth paragraph (which begins "We have a disease; progressive, incurable and fatal"). More in this article https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/ on Quote Investigator website.
Misattributed
