Quotes about goodness
page 78

Edith Sitwell photo

“Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

The Last Years of a Rebel (1967)

Steve Lyons photo
Ted Nugent photo
Peter Cook photo
George S. Patton photo

“I finished the Koran – a good book and interesting.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Diary, October 30, 1942, published in The Patton Papers 1940-1945 https://books.google.com/books?id=zaRKDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT79 (1996), p. 79.

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“The Welsh made a very good and a very hard fight against the English in self-defence, and what was the consequence? That the English were obliged to surround your territory with great castles; and the effect of this has been that, as far as I can reckon, more by far than one-half of the great remains of the castles in the whole island south of the Tweed are castles that surround Wales. That shows that Wales was inhabited by men, and by men who valued and were disposed to struggle for their liberties.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Eisteddfod in Wrexham (8 September 1888), quoted in A. W. Hutton and H. J. Cohen (eds.), The Speeches of The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone on Home Rule, Criminal Law, Welsh and Irish Nationality, National Debt and the Queen's Reign. 1888–1891 (London: Methuen, 1902), p. 61.
1880s

Gordon B. Hinckley photo
Carlo Beenakker photo
Julian of Norwich photo
John Danforth photo
Sarah Kofman photo
Hirokazu Yasuhara photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“In art the best is good enough.”

In der Kunst ist das Beste gut genug.
Italian Journey (March 3, 1787)

William Faulkner photo
Isidor Isaac Rabi photo
Norberto Bobbio photo
Heidi Klum photo
Nicholas Roerich photo
Karl Marlantes photo
Elton John photo

“He must have been a gardener that cared a lot
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop.
But now it all looks strange, it's funny how one insect
Can damage so much grain.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny), his song dedicated to John Lennon
Song lyrics, Jump Up! (1982)

Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Phil Brooks photo

“Punk: Wow, everybody, it's John Cena. He comes out here every Monday night, he's excitable, he throws his hat at somebody, everybody loves it. I am so impressed at how you do that. You get all these people to believe you're that friendly, smiling, everyday man, when I know the truth. And the truth, John Cena, is you're thoughtless, you're heartless, and above all else, you are dishonest. I'm sure there's millions of people worldwide, including yourself, that would love to believe this is over a spilled diet soda, but John, this goes way beyond my spilled diet soda. Yeah. John, you were fired from the WWE. You were gone. You gave a very tear-inducing speech in the middle of the ring about how you finally get to see your mom and hang out with your little brother, and you said you were gonna go away. You were gonna be a man of your way, but what happened? You came back later that night, and then you came back the next week, and then you came back the next week, showing all of these people who aren't intelligent to see through your facade what I have known all along—that your word is absolutely worthless. And then there's TLC, you have the man beaten. Wade Barrett, a very tough individual, and you have him beat in a chairs match, but that's not good enough for you. You don't take the high ground, you can't walk off into the sunset with your victory; you drag the man off to the side of the stage and you drop fifteen steel chairs on him, and I wanna know exactly why you think that's acceptable behavior. I wanna know why you think it's okay to show up the next night on Raw and humiliate the poor guy…
Cena: That is balderdash! Fifteen steel chairs? That's insane. It was 23 steel chairs. And in case you forgot, Wade Barrett and the Nexus gave me about five thousand beat-downs, made me their personal slave, and ended my career.
Punk: You wanna talk about ended careers, you hypocrite? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You ended the career of my good friend Dave Batista. John! John, look at me when I'm talking to you. This is a reoccurring pattern with you. Once again, you have the man beaten—last man standing, he verbally submits, how humiliating, the match is won. But, no, you AA him off a car through the very steel ramp that I'm sitting on, which facilitated the end of his career. Now we'll talk about Vickie Guerrero. I'm surprised the lovely Vickie Guerrero doesn't up and quit based on all the abuse you heap on her. It's not just the physical things to the Wade Barretts and the Dave Batistas, but it's the name-calling, it's the mental abuse to somebody as gorgeous and beautiful as Vickie Guerrero.
Cena: "It's the this… it's the that." Okay, CM Punk is gonna play Mr. Fingerpointer. Well…1.—Dave Batista broke my neck; 2.—He showed up on Raw the next night and quit on his own terms. And C—I didn't just single out Vickie Guerrero. In case you haven't been watching for the past… eight years, I talk about everybody. Uh… Michael Cole. Michael Cole has an anonymous fetish with Justin Bieber and has the word "The Miz" man-scaped right below his belly button. Me! Look at me. I look like the crazy sex child of the Incredible Hulk and Grimace. And then there's you.
Punk: Yeah, and then there's me, who happens to not be laughing. I don't know if you noticed that. You're not funny.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

December 27, 2010
WWE Raw

Aimee Mann photo

“I can't do it, and as for you
Can you in good conscience even ask me to? 'Cause what do you care about the great divide
As long as you come down on the winner's side?”

Aimee Mann (1960) American indie rock singer-songwriter (born 1960)

"How Am I Different"
Song lyrics, Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo (2000)

Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
Enoch Powell photo
Robert Owen photo
Alex Kozinski photo

“This is really a pretty good system you have here. What do you call it? "Due process". We're very proud of it.”

Alex Kozinski (1950) American judge

United States v. Juan Ramirez-Lopez, No. 01-50164 (9th Cir. January 10, 2003). http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/4CB1C1565A7DB48D88256CAA005F7F17/$file/0150164.pdf?openelement.

Errol Morris photo

“There's the Mike Wallace approach, or you can call it the Michael Moore approach, which is the adversarial approach. In the end, that is not in the service of finding out anything. It's in service of dramatizing a received view: Namely, "This guy is an asshole, and now I will illustrate how this guy is an asshole by showing his inability to answer the questions I put to him." It's not what I'm about. It's not that one approach is good and the other is bad. They just have different valences. I like confrontation as much as the next guy. I'll give you the best example I can think of for why I like my method. [During] my interview with Emily Miller, one of the wacko eyewitnesses in The Thin Blue Line, she volunteered that she had failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup. It wasn't me saying to her, "Emily Miller, how come you failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup?" Why? Because I didn't know she failed to do it, because part of the trial record said she had successfully picked him out. When I heard this, not in response to some adversarial question, just her telling me her story, I asked her, "How did you know you failed to pick out Randall Adams?"”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

She said, "I know because the policeman sitting next to me told me I had picked out the wrong person and pointed out the right person so I wouldn't make that mistake again."
Source: Pitch Weekly http://www.tipjar.com/dan/errolmorris.html

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“Many good writers, from Montaigne to Mencken, have been impolitic, colicky, or sassy.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Jesus, Jews and the Shoah: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (2003)

Subh-i-Azal photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Johnny Carson photo
Stephen Foster photo

“The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,
With sorrow where all was delight;
The time has come when the darkies have to part:
Then my old Kentucky home, good night!”

Stephen Foster (1826–1864) American songwriter

My Old Kentucky Home. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Raymond Poincaré photo
Poul Henningsen photo

“By making this chair five times as expensive, three times heavier, half as comfortable, and only a fraction as beautiful, an architect can make a good name for himself.”

Poul Henningsen (1894–1967) Danish architect

cited in: Eric Reiss (2012), Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better, p. 17: About the iconic Bentwood chair from Thonet.

Jonathan Swift photo
Harry E. Soyster photo

“Experienced military and intelligence professionals know that torture, in addition to being illegal and immoral, is an unreliable means of extracting information from prisoners. Much is being made of former CIA official John Kiriakou's statement that waterboarding "broke" a high-value terrorist involved in the 9/11 plot. There are always those who, whether out of fear or inexperience, rush to push the panic button instead of relying on what we know works best and most reliably in these situations. I would caution those who would rely on this example. It is far from clear that the information obtained from this prisoner through illegal means could not have been obtained through lawful methods. The FBI was getting good intelligence from this prisoner before the CIA took over. And there are numerous examples of cases where relying on information obtained through torture has disastrous consequences. The reality is that use of torture produces inconsistent results that are an unreliable basis for action and policy. The overwhelming consensus of intelligence professionals is that torture produces unreliable information. And the overwhelming consensus of senior military leaders is that resort to torture is dishonorable. Use of such primitive methods actually puts our own troops and our nation at risk.”

Harry E. Soyster (1935) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

"Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency: Torture Produces Unreliable Information" http://web.archive.org/web/20070629145037/http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/torture/2007/12/former-director-of-defense-intelligence.html, Human Rights First (2007-12-11)

J. C. R. Licklider photo

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.

Abbas Kiarostami photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Ron Richard photo
Jeremy Rifkin photo
Logan Pearsall Smith photo

“The disconcerting fact may first be pointed out that if you write badly about good writing, however profound may be your convictions or emphatic your expression of them, your style has a tiresome trick (as a wit once pointed out) of whispering: ‘Don’t listen!’ in your readers’ ears. And it is possible also to suggest that the promulgation of new-fangled aesthetic dogmas in unwieldy sentences may be accounted for—not perhaps unspitefully—by a certain deficiency in aesthetic sensibility; as being due to a lack of that delicate, unreasoned, prompt delight in all the varied and subtle manifestations in which beauty may enchant us.
Or, if the controversy is to be carried further; and if, to place it on a more modern basis, we adopt the materialistic method of interpreting aesthetic phenomena now in fashion, may we not find reason to believe that the antagonism between journalist critics and the fine writers they disapprove of is due in its ultimate analysis to what we may designate as economic causes? Are not the authors who earn their livings by their pens, and those who, by what some regard as a social injustice, have been more or less freed from this necessity—are not these two classes of authors in a sort of natural opposition to each other? He who writes at his leisure, with the desire to master his difficult art, can hardly help envying the profits of money-making authors.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

criticizing the Cambridge School of criticism, e.g. John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read, “Fine Writing,” pp. 306-307
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

John Stuart Mill photo
Rutherford B. Hayes photo
Erich Fromm photo

“Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.”

The Art of Loving (1956)
Context: The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard — every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

Tsunetomo Yamamoto photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“Association with women is the basic element of good manners.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Der umgang mit frauen ist das element guter sitten.
Maxim 31, trans. Stopp
Variant translation: The society of women is the foundation of good manners.
Variant translative: Intercourse with women is the element of good manners.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Sarah Vowell photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Francis Escudero photo
Samson Raphael Hirsch photo
Nicolas Chamfort photo
Ron Paul photo
Samuel Beckett photo
Dana Gioia photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Robert Jordan photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
George Long photo
Maimónides photo
Jennifer Beals photo

“…The L Word reaffirmed that good storytelling has a way of creating community. Fans everywhere have been connecting with each other online, in public and at home-viewing parties.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Speech at 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards, San Francisco, California (10 May 2008) http://www.jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/glaad2008.html.

Ernest Hemingway photo
Jef Raskin photo
Brian Wilson photo

“If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would livin' do me
God only knows what I'd be without you…”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

God Only Knows (co-written with Tony Asher)
Pet Sounds (1966)

Agnes Repplier photo
Rich Mullins photo

“We are not saved because we're good. We're good because we're saved.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997)
In Concert

John Calvin photo

“It is no small honour that God for our sake has so magnificently adorned the world, in order that we may not only be spectators of this beauteous theatre, but also enjoy the multiplied abundance and variety of good things which are presented to us in it.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Works (1844) edited by the Calvin translation society, as quoted in Reformed Spirituality: An Introduction for Believers (1991) by Howard L. Rice, p. 59.

Joseph Addison photo

“Death only closes a Man's Reputation, and determines it as good or bad.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 349 (10 April 1712)
Famously seen on the brothel wall in the film Easy Rider.
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Ed Bradley photo

“I learned this from Mike Wallace. Listen, be a good listener. You don't have to fill space. Just sit there and listen.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Larry King, Interview with Ed Bradley, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/08/lkl.00.html, February 8, 2004, Larry King Live, CNN]

James Morrison photo

“I've got to take this chance and make it into something good.”

James Morrison (1984) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

One Last Chance
Song lyrics, Undiscovered (James Morrison album) (2006)

Mac Danzig photo
Daniel Levitin photo
George Canning photo

“Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe,
Bold I can meet,—perhaps may turn his blow!
But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save, save, oh save me from the candid friend!”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

New Morality. Compare: "Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies", attributed to Maréchal Villars, when taking leave of Louis XIV.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Ambrose Bierce photo
Philippe Starck photo
Cato the Elder photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“It is easy to explain. This is the first time I ever went into a season without aches and pains. One year I was bothered by a bad back and it carried into another season. Another year I hurt my hand. This year I feel good.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

On his vastly improved run production, as quoted in "3 Years Are Up and Clemente's At Top of Heap" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J8MVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HBAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5046%2C533946&dq=easy by Oscar Fraley (UPI), in The Milwaukee Sentinel (Saturday, June 11, 1960), Page 6, Part 2
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1960</big>

Verghese Kurien photo
Agnes Repplier photo
Joseph Gordon-Levitt photo
William James photo
Tad Williams photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Jane Austen photo

“The pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinions will make good amends for orange wine.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1808-06-20) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I even sponsored them myself, although I don't like really like to talk about my charity, erm, work. Which is a good job because I do so much that you'd never shut me up. If I spoke about it. Which I don't like to do.”

Rob Smyth (1977) English/Irish rugby league player

Cricket England versus India; Third Test, day two; Over-by-over: morning session http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricket/overbyover/story/0,,2143527,00.html

“When I look back on my life and consider all the way I have been led, above all I thank God to Whom I owe everything, for all His goodness to me and ascribe to Him all the praise and honour.”

As quoted in The chemist and druggist https://archive.org/stream/b19974760M1453#page/222/mode/2up (1906), UBM. p. 222.

Larry Niven photo
Roger Ebert photo
Robert A. Taft photo