Quotable utterings of the famous (Part 3)

The following text is originally lifted from the trivia section of The Jakarta Post dated Saturday, 29 March 2008.

~Compiled from various sources~

  • "Luck is the residue of design" - Branch Rikey, former owner of the Brooklyn Dodger Baseball Team.
  • "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die" - Mel Brooks.
  • "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so" - Bertrand Russell.
  • "Wit is educated insolence" - Aristotle.
  • "My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher" - Socrates.
  • "Egotist is a person more interested in himself than in me" - Ambrose Bierce.
  • "A narcissist is someone better looking than you are" - Gore Vidal.
  • "Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them" - Samuel Palmer.
  • "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity" - Albert Einstein.
  • "The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows" - Aristotle Onassis.
  • "Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralysing suspicion that he is trying to be funny" - Guy Davenport.
  • "When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite" - Sir Winston Churchill.
  • "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains" - Sir Winston Churchill.
  • "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth" - Niels Bohr.
  • "We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?" - Niels Bohr.
  • "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong" - Buckminster Fuller.
  • "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite" - Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
  • "I would have made a good Pope" - Richard Nixon.
  • "In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience" - W.B. Prescott.
  • "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin" - John von Neumann.
  • "The mistakes are all waiting to be made" - chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower on the game's opening position.
  • "It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims" - Aristotle.
  • "Grove giveth and Gates taketh away" - Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands.
  • "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one" - Albert Einstein.
  • "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important" - Bertrand Russell.
  • "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a tonne of explanation" - H.H. Munro (Saki).
  • "There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is more difficult" - C.A.R. Hoare.
  • "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Albert Einstein.
  • "What do you take me for, an idiot?" - Charles de Gaulle, when a journalist asked him if he was happy.
  • "I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon" - Bill Hirst.
  • "Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do" - Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • "A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines" - Frank Lloyd Wright.
  • "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid" - George Bernard Shaw.
  • "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me" - Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
  • "A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies" - Oscar Wilde.
  • "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names" - John F. Kennedy.
  • "Logic is in the eye of the logician" - Gloria Steinem.
  • "No one can earn a million dollars honestly" - William Jennings Bryan.
  • "Everything has been figured out, except how to live" - Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech" - Martin Fraquhar Tupper.
  • "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it" - Moses Hadas.
  • "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it" - Groucho Marx.
  • "It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating" - Oscar Wilde.
  • "When ideas fail, words come in very handy" - Goethe.
  • "In the end, everything is a gag" - Charlie Chaplin.
  • "The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people" - Lucille S. Harper.
  • "You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there" - Yogi Berra.
  • "I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known" - Walt Disney.
  • "He who hesitates is a damned fool" - Mae West.
  • "Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre" - Gail Godwin.
  • "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" - Henry Kissinger.
  • "The graveyards are full of indispensable men" - Charles de Gaulle.
  • "You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty" - Sacha Guitry.
  • "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" - Honore de Balzac.
  • "If women didn't exist, all money in the world would have no meaning" - Aristotle Onassis.
  • "I am not young enough to know everything" - Oscar Wilde.
  • "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same" - Oscar Wilde.
  • "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his" - Gen. George Patton.
  • "Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  • "There is no sincerer love than the love of food" - George Bernard Shaw.
  • "I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking" - Katherine Cebrian.
  • "I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it" - Steven Wright.
  • "Mr Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour" - Gioacchino Rossini.
  • "Manuscript is something submitted in haste and returned in leisure" - Oliver Herford.
  • "The covers of this book are too far apart" - Ambrose Bierce.
  • "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.
  • "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end" - Igor Stravinsky.

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