Quotes about anything
page 40

“I didn't care about the statistics in anything else. I didn't, and don't pay any attention to the statistics of the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don't start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.”

Bill James (1949) American baseball writer and statistician

1985 Baseball Abstract

Death, People, Football, Weather

“What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace. He said, in a regretful tone, 'The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped'. I replied that the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation. 'Well', he said, 'I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines'. He spoke with great earnestness and much solicitude, and seemed troubled by the attitude of Mr. Greeley, and the growing impatience there was being manifested through the North at the war. He said he was being accused of protracting the war beyond its legitimate object, and of failing to make peace when he might have done so to advantage. He was afraid of what might come of all these complaints, but was persuaded that no solid and lasting peace could come short of absolute submission on the part of the rebels, and he was not for giving them rest by futile conferences at Niagara Falls, or elsewhere, with unauthorized persons. He saw the danger of premature peace, and, like a thoughtful and sagacious man as he was, he wished to provide means of rendering such consummation as harmless as possible. I was the more impressed by this benevolent consideration because he before said, in answer to the peace clamor, that his object was to save the Union, and to do so with or without slavery. What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 434–435.

Men, War, Peace, Hope

“These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"The Oral Tradition"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Change

“This argument too shows that in truth we know nothing about anything, but every man shares the generally prevailing opinion.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Fragments

Truth

“Actually, it's tough, because he's not really screwing up. He seems to be doing a good job, but we're there just in case — the first time he does anything.”

Jimmy Fallon (1974) American TV Personality

In answer the question "Is it easy to write jokes [on Saturday Night Live] about President Bush?", posed in the summer of 2001
Smith, Kerry L. (2001-07-05), "Jimmy Fallon". Rolling Stone. (872):153

Time

“To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

Source: Eyewitness Testimony (1979), p. 101

Confidence

“The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych."”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." Colm Tóibín, novelist – portrait of the artist http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/19/colm-toibin-novelist-portrait-artist, The Guardian (19 February 2013)

Love, Thinking, Learning, Time

“Once again there appears to be a considerable difference of opinion. I wanted a series with distinction, I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but makes no comment about anything. But all they seem to want is maniacs in a cemetery. When I complain they pat me on the head, condescend, and hope I go away. When I was on the Twilight Zone I took the bows, but I also took the brickbats, because when it was bad it was usually my fault, but when it's bad on the Night Gallery, I had nothing to do with it, yet my face is on it all the time.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling: American Masters.
Other

Hope, Appearance, Time, Night

“Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

After having been led astray on neutron-proton coupling by reports of "beta-decay experts".
Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "The 7 Percent Solution", p. 255
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

“If I spent too much time here in Los Angeles, I could probably get a little messed up. It's not real here, being on a set with only actors. I've worked with people who were totally cool, then once they got all the publicity and attention, it just went to their heads. If I did anything like that my friends would say, 'What's up with you? That really doesn't fly here.' I'm lucky I have a really strong network of people I'm close to, so I try to keep as grounded as possible by going home every weekend, where I'm just normal.”

Larisa Oleynik (1981) actress

TV Guide, October 26, 1996.

People, Angels, Home, Strong

“I have a bag full of words, and when one of us comes up with a good piece of music, I look in the bag to see if anything there will fit. If nothing does, I sit down and try to put down on paper what the music makes me feel; very rarely will a piece of writing inspire a piece of music.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

CANOE 1996

Music, Feeling

“One is also reminded of how in art the tortoise so often overtakes the hare. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. As long as they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were too difficult, too "controversial."”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

On Hans Hofmann, in "Hofmann", in Georges (Fall 1961)
1960s

Art, Time

“As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, … it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Love, Life, Death, Fate

“What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

Programmers At Work (1986)

Idea

“Motivate the younger generation to listen to music especially, when they are tired, when they are upset about anything. Music is the best remedy; it remediates you mentally, physically and emotionally.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Ideas: Ideals: India.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

Music, Motivation

“If one takes the thought into one's head that the leaders of the people do not receive their inspirations directly from providence itself, that they obey purely human impulses, the prestige that surrounds them will disappear. One will irreverently resist their sovereign decisions, as one resists anything man-made whose utility has not been clearly demonstrated.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 44-45

People, Decision

“I liked the room [his new place in London, c. 1906] the moment I saw it, so here I am set up as a swell... Don't you take this to be a trap set up for the unwary, you know you're always touching a sore spot when you talk painting, and drag my suicides before the public, the right name for potboilers, one has to give up all aim for any good intention, and do the technical skill and cleverness to please those with halfpennies and farthings in their pocket, to be favoured to live... I just got a letter from somebody, saying: but with potboiling one can make money, money always considered to be the principal. I told him he was greatly mistaken, when a little honesty remains, one can scarcely ask anything for them.”

Matthijs Maris (1839–1917) Dutch painter

in a letter to David Croal Thomson (1907), as cited in: The Brothers Maris (James – Matthew – William), ed. Charles Holme; text: D.C. Thomson https://ia800204.us.archive.org/1/items/cu31924016812756/cu31924016812756.pdf; publishers, Offices of 'The Studio', London - Paris, 1907, p. BMxv

Money, Suicide, Painting

“No living reptile has cheeks. But no living reptile has grinding teeth anything remotely resembling those of a duckbill. If the duckbills could have evolved such unreptilian teeth, why couldn't they have evolved unreptilian teeth?”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 165
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

“We're now in the midst of a 3rd World War, but this time the enemy is ourselves, and the objective is to save the planet FROM ourselves. There's no hope for masses of humanity to do anything — they never have, they never will. All social change comes from the passion and intervention of individuals or small groups of individuals. Slavery wasn't ended by any government or any institution. Women got the right to vote not because of any government. The civil rights movement, the same thing. India with Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa with Nelson Mandela. Again, it's always individuals. You need those individuals with the passion and the energy to get involved. In fact, I don't know of any government or any institutions that are doing anything to solve any of these problems. All over the world, all I am seeing is individuals and non-government organizations that are passionately involved in protecting ecosystems and species, and that's where I see some optimism. That's where I see results are happening.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

"Sharkwater" documentary

Women, War, World, Hope

“We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on…”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 91
Variant translation: A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Thinking

“Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Life, Happiness, Pleasure, Feeling

“Freedom became one of the beacon lights of my life and it has remained so ever since. Freedom with the passing of years transcended the mere freedom of my country and embraced freedom of man everywhere and from every sort of trammel—above all, it meant freedom of the human personality, freedom of the mind, freedom of the spirit. This freedom has become the passion of my life and I shall not see it compromised for bread, for security, for prosperity, for the glory of the state or for anything else.”

Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan, (said at the height of the Emergency when Indira Gandhi stated that ‘food is more important than freedom’), quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008), also quoted at http://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/celebrating-a-legacy-96135.html Quotes by JP

Life, Freedom, Light, Passion

“Kindled with his touted (and still touted) ‘brother-hood of mankind,’ Marx said that toward Poland the correct line would be to take "from the western part of Poland anything that can be taken, let the Germans occupy their fortresses under the pretext of 'protection,' use the people for cannon fodder and devour their country.’”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The Intellectual Student’s Guide to Survival (1968), pp. 75-76

People, Parting, Country

“I don't believe in anything you have to believe in.”

Fran Lebowitz (1950) author and public speaker from the United States

Reported by Steve Pinker, " I am Steve Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard. Ask me anything. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a67x4/i_am_steve_pinker_a_cognitive_psychologist_at/c8uiccn", Reddit.com (March 12, 2013). Other

“People say it is inappropriate for me to get arrested in uniform, but to me it is the validation of all that I signed up to do. I say what I had to go through is what tarnishes the uniform more than anything.”

Dan Choi (1981) American activist

Dan Choi, November 2010, The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/dan-choi/8278/,

People

“It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

On elected politicians
1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Soul, Change, Falseness

“The Constitution denies the states the power to make anything other than gold or silver coins legal tender in payment of debts.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

“The question, "What is the purpose thereof?" cannot be asked about anything which is not the product of an agent; therefore we cannot ask what is the purpose of the existence of God.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.13

God, Question

“Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Dancing in the Flames (1997), p. 23

Age, Nature

“The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 19

Life, Stupidity, World, Way

“Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton (1986).

Music

“If you try hard enough, anything can happen.”

Charlie Sifford (1922–2015) professional golfer

After winning the Greater Hartford Open, Charlie Sifford, Who Shattered a Barrier of Race in Golf, Dies at 92 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/sports/golf/charlie-sifford-first-black-player-on-pga-tour-dies-at-92.html by New York Times

“The logic of governmental power is to exercise it such that Republicans can talk "Terrific free market!" language until they actually have power. Where upon, its program after program and crony after crony. The extraordinary bailout occurred under the Bush administration. I think that raises extraordinary dangers of the fact that as power accumulates, it never gives anything back. Its always expanding.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

Exercises, Thinking

“Iraq has violated and taken over the territory of a country which is a full member of the United Nations. That is totally unacceptable and if it were allowed to endure then there would be many other small countries that could never feel safe…The fundamental question is this: whether the nations of the world have the collective will effectively to see that Security Council Resolution is upheld, whether they have the collective will effectively to do anything which the Security Council further agrees to see that Iraq withdraws and that the government of Kuwait is restored to Kuwait.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Joint Press Conference with President Bush (2 August 1990) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108170 Third term as Prime Minister

World, Feeling, Question, Country

“If anything ever happened to any one who eagerly longed and never hoped, that is a true pleasure to the mind.”
Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie.

Gaio Valerio Catullo list of poems by Catullus

CVII, lines 1–2
Carmina

Pleasure, Hope

“The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Source: Labyrinths of Reason (1988), Chapter 12: "Omniscience", p. 260

“If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

Source: A Walk in the Woods (1997), Chapter 6 (p. 81)

Suffering

“If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl E. Weick (1979; 206), cited in: James P. Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson. "Organizational memory." Academy of management review 16.1 (1991): 57-91.
1970s

Learning, Memory

“"That money," she cried, almost vehemently, "you can be sure I won’t lay a hand on it unless there’s terrible need." He looked away. He couldn’t bear to hear her talking about the rents and poverty. Would the two of them ever talk about anything else? Was that what he’d come home for? To hear more complaints? Outside people were hurrying past, almost racing toward the busy streets of town. Others were on their way to the movies. Girls were going out to meet their boyfriends. There was youth in the streets, and all of that was waiting for him.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 235

Money, People, Youth, Way

“White: You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

The Sunset Limited (2006)

World, Courage

“I don’t listen to anything on the radio but NPR and occasional oldies programs. I can’t comment on the content or format of most commercial radio but I have read the statistics about the step-by-step deregulation of FCC rules that has allowed monopolies like Clear Channel to buy up massive shares of the airwaves. This has damaged our business (music) and our culture (American). The internet is offering bold alternatives but a transistor radio is only $25.00 and not everyone is hooked up through a computer and high speed connection.”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Quotes from NatalieMerchant.com

Music, Business, Reading, Speed

“Four years ago almost all of the applauded and selling art was New York School painting. It was preponderant in most galleries, which were uninclined to show anything new. The publications which praised it praised it indiscriminately and were uninterested in new developments. Much of the painting was by the "second generation" many of them epigones. Pollock was dead. Kline and Brooks had painted their last good paintings in 1956 and 1957. Guston's paintings had become soft and gray — his best ones are those around 1954 and 1955. Motherwell's and De Kooning's paintings were somewhat vague. None of these artists were criticized. In 1959 Newman's work was all right, and Rothko's was even better than before. Presumably, though none were shown in New York, Clyfford Still's paintings were all right. This lackadaisical situation was thought perfect. The lesser lights and some of their admirers were incongruously dogmatic : this painting was not only doing well but was the only art for the time. They thought it was a style. By now, it is.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd, in: Arts Yearbook. (1964) p. 23
1960s

School, Art, Light, Time

“The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism (2002)

People, Question, Reality, Time

“[About Francis of Assisi] I saw St. Francis at first in his old age, at prayer and sickly, of an indescribable cheerfulness and purity and humility. Everything in him, everything that constituted his life, all his difficulties, are now transfigured and have become translucent. And this happened through prayer. The things that occupy him no longer contain anything at all that is purely personal, not a trace of annoyance or injury or resentment for the unjust things inflicted on him. God alone is left, as well as perfect service in the indescribable happiness of one who serves and in uninterrupted contemplation.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Book of All Saints (1966)

Life, God, Happiness, Age

“Hideous in their apotheosis
The kings of the mine and of the rail.
Have they ever done anything other
Than steal work?
Inside the safeboxes of the gang,
What work had created melted.
By ordering that they give it back,
The people want only their due.”

Eugène Edine Pottier (1816–1887) French politician

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail ?
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a créé s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
The Internationale (1864)

People

“After all, the leaders of our country were not elected to be tittered at. Censors have to draw the line somewhere. For instance, we are allowed to say Ronald Reagan is a lousy actor, but we're not allowed to say he's a lousy governor – which is ridiculous. We know he's a good actor. And you can't say anything bad about President Johnston [sic], because you shouldn't insult the President. But if you compliment him, who will believe it?”

Pat Paulsen (1927–1997) United States Marine

"An Editorial: Should TV Be Censored?", The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, unidentified episode Featured in Pat Paulsen for President (1968), part 2 of 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbP0ufyax5A&feature=relmfu, 05:01 ff (14:01 ff in full program) Alternative version archived at "Should Television Shows Be Censored?" http://www.paulsen.com/censor.html, Paulsen.com, January 7, 1968

Drawing, Country

“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

"Foreword to 'The Pathology of Power'" by Norman Cousins (Norton, 1987), from At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (Norton, 1997, ISBN 0-393-31609-2), Part II: Cold War in Full Bloom, p. 118

Water

“He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems.”

Robert J. Sawyer book Frameshift

Source: Frameshift (1997), Chapter 26 (p. 184)

Problem, Thinking

“When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

“The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician… This might sound like a heretical point of view for those of us who grew up believing the essential American myth that we could become anything we wanted. it's clear from [our] research that each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

As cited in: Marsha Blackburn (2008), Life Equity. p. 30
StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007

Reality, Success, Personality

“I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 3

Time

“Jack: (to camera) My office! (indicates mess) I'm sorry about all this, but we in the Labour Party link drabness with idealism, see. I'm a paid agent of the party, but whenever I need to know anything I have to ring up Conservative Central Office. It's a very plush place, that - carpets plucking at your bleeding ankles. You see, they link drabness with idealism, too.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Vote, vote, vote for Nigel Barton (1965)

“And I don't want to mean anything to you,
I don't want to tempt you to be true.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Echo
Lyrics, Echo (1999)

“I did The Mike O'Malley Show. It aired twice. You know, that was a really tough experience because Mike is a really good friend of mine, and was before that, and we were all friends, everybody on the show. It was Mike, and it was me, and Mike's sister Kerry, and Missy Yager, who I was then dating… well, we had just broken up; we had lived together for four years and we did that. And this guy Mark Rosenthal and Kate Walsh. And we were all friends, and we were all excited at the opportunity to do this show together. We were kind of shocked, and we thought, "God, this is so cool, that the six of us are doing this show!" And then we realized that they never intended to follow it or support us. You know, I think that show got a really bad rap, but by the end -- by the sixth or seventh episode or whatever it was that we made -- we were starting to find a voice on that show, and we were very disappointed. I took the disappointment of that really to heart, and the year after that got cancelled was probably the darkest year of my life. It was tough. It was a really tough time for me. And I didn't get a lot of work. And I didn't do anything, I just kind of drank those years away.”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"The Will Arnett Interview," Television Without Pity (2005) http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/articles/content/a1005/index-4.html 2005

Life, God, Disappointment, Guy

“To anyone who is not an artist it must seem rather strange that Degas who could do anything — for whom setting down what he saw presented no difficulties at all — should have continued to draw the same poses year after year — often, it would seem, with increasing difficulty. Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs, it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers. He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form, but this did not prevent him looking for the truth in what might seem an artificial situation.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 13: Degas

Truth, Idea, Drawing, Perfection

“I am sometimes also asked whether the October Crisis taught me anything about the art of governing, or about the means that were at my disposal for defusing the crisis. First of all, it taught me that you can be the prescient futurologist in the world, you can lay out the best-made plans and define your priorities with the utmost care, but if you show yourself to be incapable of managing a crisis when it arises, you will lose your right to govern and the whole thing will blow up in your face.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 2, 1968 - 1974 Power And Responsibility, p. 149-150
Memoirs (1993)

World, Art

“We can argue about their intelligence (which we would likely define in human-centric terms anyway), their ability to understand human language, or even the extent to which they really understand and know the world around them, but there’s no argument that can convincingly show that animals don’t feel pain, and that they have no interest in avoiding that pain. If anything, animals are more sensitive to the world around them than we are, given their heightened sensory abilities.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 25

Pain, World, Feeling, Intelligence

“Look at Mother Teresa. She spent her whole life being holy. She didn't benefit anyone in any real sense. She didn't work on stopping disease, helping poverty, doing anything that would relieve the condition of her countrymen. She just went around the city, picked up dying people, and took care of them while they died. It was a good thing, no doubt, but it meant no betterment, no progress, no help, no relief from pain. She longed to be holy. She wanted to be a saint. Now she's a saint.
Salk isn't a saint. But he did more for the human race than Mother Teresa did. He didn't long to be holy, which meant having faith, not asking questions, doing something unpleasant without thought or complaint. He longed to do good, which meant finding things out, asking hard questions, and thinking hard, deep thoughts. Goodness and holiness are two different things, unfortunately.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Strange Horizons interview (2008)

Life, Pain, People, Disease

“No one with any sense of self-respect will place himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those who are less lucky than himself in birth, health, money, good looks, capacity, or anything else. Indeed, that dislike and even disgust should be felt by the fortunate for the unfortunate, or at any rate for those who have been discovered to have met with any of the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 10

Money, Health, Birth, Nature

“It did seem to me that tomorrow you could wake up to anything, and that there just are no rules anymore.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

The Killing Season, Episode three: The Long Shadow (2010–13)

“During the last 100 years, the House of Lords has never contributed one iota to popular liberties or popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal; but during that time it has protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech at Birmingham, 4th August 1884, quoted in "The House of Lords: A handbook for Liberal speakers, writers and workers" (Liberal Publication Department, 1910), p. 96.
1880s

Freedom, Time, Housing

“The reason why so few persons are agreeable in conversation is that each thinks more of what he desires to say, than of what the others say, and that we make bad listeners when we want to speak. Yet it is necessary to listen to those who talk, we should give them the time they want, and let them say even senseless things; never contradict or interrupt them; on the contrary, we should enter into their mind and taste, illustrate their meaning, praise anything they say that deserves praise, and let them see we praise more from our choice than from agreement with them. To please others we should talk on subjects they like and that interest them, avoid disputes upon indifferent matters, seldom ask questions, and never let them see that we pretend to be better informed than they are.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), V. On Conversation

Question, Thinking, Time, Personality

“I'm waiting 'til they get all this kit in one six by three inch lump of metal and you just stick it up your arse and it does everything for you. You get music all the time, everything's in vivid colour, your taste and all your hearing is enhanced, and you never have to do anything ever again. You can stay in bed and just live in this vortex of sensation.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on being asked by Jonathan Ross about modern technology
Other

Music, Time, Waiting

“It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U. S. ] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you.”

Keith Ellison (1963) American politician and lawyer

Meeting with Atheists for Human Rights, July 08, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070710224408/http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1291147.html

Country, Box

“The real difficulties which beset this question, do not arise from anything in Ireland, so much as from the constitution of the Government. This House, and the other House of Parliament, are almost exclusively aristocratic in their character. The Administration is therefore necessarily the same, and on the Treasury benches aristocracy reigns supreme. Not fewer than seven Members of the Cabinet are Members of the House of Lords; and every other Member of it is either a Lord by title, or on the very threshold of the peerage by birth or marriage. I am not blaming them for this; it may even be that from neither House of Parliament can fourteen better men be chosen to fill their places. But I maintain that in the present position of Ireland, and looking at human nature as it is, it is not possible that fourteen Gentlemen, circumstanced as these are, can meet round the Council table, and with unbiassed minds fairly discuss the question of Ireland, as it now presents itself to this House, to the country, and to the world.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/aug/25/employment-of-the-poor-ireland in the House of Commons (25 August 1848). 1840s

Men, Marriage, World, Birth

“It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Nelson Mandela on words, Closing address 13th International Aids Conference, Durban, South Africa (14 July 2000). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes 2000s

People, Way, Understanding, Solitude

“To have never done anything but make the eighteenth part of a pin, is a sorry account for a human being to give of his existence.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter VIII, p. 98 (See also: Adam Smith)

Parting

“The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture. God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.” I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Death, God, People, Dead

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml) 2000s, 2001

Life, Men, People, Education

“I don't know anything about Angola, but Angola's in trouble.”

Charles Barkley (1963) American basketball player

Press conference before the USA played Angola in the 1st round of the 1992 Olympics.

“Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not afraid of anything.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

"Sheehan, in Cuba, protests Guantanamo prison," MSNBC, 2007-01-06 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16504209 2007

“Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch. But it's an article of faith among those with no military experience that the Iraqi military is low-hanging fruit.”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

Knight Ridder, 1 November 2002
2000

Faith, Guy

“Right now the Jews are still surrounded by enemies who are sworn to their death as a nation. Their only hope is to turn to God with their whole heart, and if they obey Him, they will have victory. Only time will tell us if they have learned anything from history.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Defender's Guide for Life's Toughest Questions (2011)

Death, God, Hope, History

“I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 5, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

Understanding

“A young person today has a nanosecond attention span, so whatever you do in a humor has to be short. Younger people do not wait for anything that takes time to develop. We're going totally to one-liners. Telling a joke is risk taking. Younger people are more insecure and not willing to put themselves on the line, so a quick one-liner is much safer.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Warren St. John, The New York Times (May 28, 2005) "Wit's end: The death of the joke - Old-style wisecracks are passe in an age of decreasing attention spans, political correctness and the Internet", The Orlando Sentinel, p. E1.

People, Time, Waiting, Personality

“When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness and he sometimes says to me: "You are I and I am you." I see, then, those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me. In short, what proceeds from those eyes and that face is what I said that I saw in that previous darkness which comes from within, and which delights me so that I can say nothing about it. When I am in the God-man my soul is alive. And I am in the God-man much more than in the other vision of seeing God with darkness. The soul is alive in that vision concerning the God-man. The vision with darkness, however, draws me so much more that there is no comparison. On the other hand, I am in the God-man almost continually. It began in this continual fashion on a certain occasion when I was given the assurance that there was no intermediary between God and myself. Since that time there has not been a day or a night in which I did not continually experience this joy of the humanity of Christ.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, p. 205

God, Soul, Fashion, Time

“The God of All Life was really more like a light than anything else, and the whole divine arena just lit up as if a universal spotlight was turned on from the inside of things, bathing every visible object. Everything Emir saw was lit up as if even the blades of grass had bulbs inside them, though bulbs hadn't been invented yet or spotlights either. Still, a new kind of superlight splashed out over the arena. More than this, the light itself was somehow kindly and alive, as if the God of All Life was everywhere at once, made of light, but with a presence inside that was invisible.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Emir's Education In The Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979), p. 65-66

Life, God, Light, Grass

“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

Hong Kong press conference in the late 1980s
1980s

“The person who is dedicated to nonviolence is more active than anyone, because he does not only want to overcome indifference and hatred, weariness and egoism within himself, but he wants to overcome anything which divides and hurts all people and therefore the person dedicated to nonviolence does not accept society as it is.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

People, Hurt, Personality, Indifference

“Do they find in the history of St. Domingo, and in the present condition of Jamaica, under the recent experiments which have been made upon the institution of slavery in the liberation of the blacks, before God, in his wisdom, designed it should be done — do they there find anything to stimulate them to future exertion in the cause of abolition? Or should they not find there satisfactory evidence that their past course was founded in error?”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech, 1850
1850s

Wisdom, God, Error, History

“She's anything but typical;
She's so unpredictable.
Oh but even at her worst it ain't that bad.
She's as real as real can be
And she's every fantasy.
Lord she's every lover that I've ever had.
And she's every lover that I've never had.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

She's Every Woman, written by Victoria Shaw and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Fresh Horses (1995)

Lovers

“If I could believe that this was said sincerely, I could put up with anything.”

Terence Eunuchus

Act I, scene 2, 96, line 176.
Eunuchus
Original: (la) si istuc crederem/sincere dici, quidvis possem perpeti.

Sincerity

“So I am skeptical about the argument that the subprime mortgage problem will contaminate the whole mortgage market, that housing construction will come to a halt, and that the economy will slip into a recession. Every step in this chain is questionable and none has been quantified. If we have learned anything from the past 20 years it is that there is a lot of stability built into the real economy.”

Robert Lucas Jr. (1937) American economist

Robert E. Lucas, "Mortgages and Monetary Policy", The Wall Street Journal WEDNESDAY, September 19, 2007

Question, Problem, Learning, Past

“When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

“Albert Gleizes did not know Montmartre, had never seen anything of Picasso or Juan Gris, never heard Maurice Princet construct an infinite number of different spaces for the use of painters, but he described to me the absurdity of the museums in which mournful, extravagantly three dimensional crowds threaten to crush the visitor by jumping out of their frames.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

“I suppose my mega heroes are the films of Michael Powell and Sam Peckinpah. I would have loved to have looked over their shoulder. I’m a bit of a cinephile. I love cinema. It’s an amazing medium. I can go and watch anything from very, very arty films to huge Hollywood spectaculars and everything in between.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[IndieLondon, Donkey Punch - Olly Blackburn interview, http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Film-Review/donkey-punch-olly-blackburn-interview, www.indielondon.co.uk, 23 February 2012, 2008]

Love

“One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say "exploit it"? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it's around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit… or perhaps some of us already have.”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire

Thinking

“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Addendum for C
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

Learning

“Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal. It is exactly a woman’s greater sexual power that often makes a man so fearful of being rejected by her that he buys himself drinks to reduce his fear. In essence, her sexual power often leads to him drinking; his sexual power rarely leads to her drinking. If anything is evidence of her power over him, it is his being expected to spend his money to buy her drinks without her reciprocating.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 320.

Money, Fear, Sex, Drink

“Whatever else he was during his life, he was never dull, and the world forgives almost anything but stupidity.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Life, Stupidity, World, Forgiveness

“A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth — science — which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. IX, ch. 10
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Women, Men, People, Truth

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

Life, Hate, Truth, Youth

“And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: — Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Pleasure

“What makes anyone think [Apple Watch is] going to "disrupt" anything, other than the careers of the people who planned and executed that abortion?”

Karl Denninger American businessman

The iSnicker http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229422 in The Market Ticker (19 September 2014)

People, Thinking

“Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.”

Henry James book Washington Square

Washington Square (1881), ch. XIV.

Women, Men, People

“[Written on back of photograph of Ruth and Daniel]
"Ruth Levinson
Third grade teacher.
She believes in me and I can be anything I want when I grow up.
I can even change the world."”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Daniel McCallum, Chapter 28 Ira, p. 335
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

World, Change

“Choosing only the things you like
isn't irresponsible.
If you can't find anything you like
then why take the responsibility?
I take only the possibilities that I'm ready to accept.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Surreal
Lyrics, Duty

“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.”

George Pólya book How to Solve It

2nd ed. (1957), p. xv
How to Solve It (1945)

“In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

2. Stylistic Questions. p. 24–25.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Help, Personality

“It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men…. He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded…. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stock-still amazed…. John… sat in a half-maze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?… If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard, aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility…. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home — the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother…. It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, 'will you step this way please sir?'… The manager was sorry, very very sorry — but he explained that some mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of course… before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square… and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said, 'John Jones you're a natural-born fool.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire....
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. XIII: Of the Coming of John

Life, Men, Money, World

Quotes about anything page 40

Quotes about anything
page 40