Say it again, Sam

Smart (or dumb) sayings get stuck in our head... is that the accumulation of wisdom? Sometimes we even come up with them ourselves. Keeping the good stuff and removing the fluff is how we build up our own Weltanschauung. Here are some of the things that have made it through my filter.

They are “arranged” in a sort of merge of two orders: the order in which I read them, and the order in which they were published. In addition, I have factored out a few recurring themes. But themes are so cross-cutting that even hypertext can’t really get them all sorted and factored. Progress continues.

Trump and Trumpism

I have extracted quotes on this topic into a separate list. It is a strict subset of this page, so you won’t miss anything if you stay here. It is just for convenience.

Contents

1. A Great Truth
2. Foresight (lack)
3. Foresight
4. Hindsight (lack)
5. History
6. Confidence and Doubt
7. Freedom
8. Being Human
9. Writing
10. A. Solzhenitsyn
11. Eric Hoffer
12. Evil
13. Ayn Rand
14. Winning & Losing
15. Trump
16. Gender
17. Contrast and Compare
18. Me
19. Philosophy
20. Owning the Libs
21. General Collection

Explaining a Great Truth

• “The opposite of a great truth is also true.”
  — attributed to Niels Bohr

I used to be dubious of this idea, but here are two examples:

• “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insane.”
  — attributed to all sorts of people, notably Albert Einstein
  
  
• “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result is also insane.”
  — Me, 13 February 2010
  
  

And another example pair:

• “Premature [software] optimization is the root of all evil.”
  — Donald Knuth, Structured Programming with go to Statements, ACM Journal Computing Surveys 6 (4): 268, December 1974
  
  
• “Premature generalization is also the root of all evil.”
  — Me, throughout my programming career
  
  

Nobody Could Have Seen It Coming

It’s ignorance (or mendacity) to say “nobody did.” True hubris to say “nobody could have.”

• “No-one could have forseen that militarily not everything would work out as one had believed.”
  — Wilhelm von Stumm, concerning 1914
  
  
• “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.”
  — Condoleezza Rice, 16 May 2002
  
  
• “Military action will not last more than a week.”
  — Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor, 23 Jan 2003
  
  
• “It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
  — Donald Rumsfeld, Town Hall Meeting At Aviano Air Base, 7 February 2003
  
  
• “A year from now I’d be surprised if there’s not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.”
  — Richard Perle, 22 September 2003
  
  
• “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees [in New Orleans].”
  — George W. Bush, 1 September 2005 on ABC’s Good Morning America
  
  
• “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence [in Iraq].”
  — Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, N.Y. Times 6 August 2006
  
  
• “I don’t think anybody anticipated this thing [mortgage crisis] getting as bad as it did.”
  — Jim Miller of Citigroup, Chase, and Capital One, N.Y. Times 14 Oct 2010
  
  
• “I don’t think anyone anticipated that Hurricane Katrina would do what it did.”
  — Ray Nagin, on The Daily Show, 20 June 2011
  
  
• “This was a completely unforeseen slide.”
  — John Pennington, emergency manager for Snohomish County, re the Oso, WA landslide; Seattle Times, 30 March 2014
  
  
• “There was no indication, no indication at all.”
  — Steve Thomsen, public works director for Snohomish County, Seattle Times, 30 March 2014
  
  
• “[T]he two creeks in the area are known as ‘Slide Creek’ and ‘Mud Flow Creek.’”
  — Seattle Times, 30 March 2014
  
  
• “I don’t think anyone anticipated that the characterization of the bill would be, this denies to services to a specific class to Hoosiers.”
  — Brian Bosma, Indiana House Speaker, in Huffington Post, 2015-03-30
  
  
• “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
  — Donald Trump, White House address, 27 Feb 2017
  
  
• “It’s an unforeseen problem.” “It’s something that nobody expected.” “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.” “Nobody ever thought of numbers like this” “So there’s never been anything like this in history.”
  — Donald Trump, White House addresses, 6, 14 & 19 Mar 2020
  
  

They Did See It Coming

• “I do so wish sometimes, that I could just pop home for an hour or two as easily in the flesh as in the spirit. No doubt the explorers of 2015, if there is anything left to explore, will not only carry their pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes but will also receive their nourishment & warmth by wireless ... but, of course, there will be an aerial daily excursion to both poles then ...”
  — Thomas Orde-Lees, while on Shackelton’s Antarctic expedition, 1915
  
  
• “At the very least, comsats and personalized transceivers will banish forever the exasperation of waiting on a corner for a friend while he mistakenly waits for you on another.”
  — Arthur C. Clarke, “Man and Space”, Life Science Library 1964
  
  
• “If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.”
  — Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632
  
  
• “Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere ... an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman’s earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.”
  — Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Image of Victory,’ commencement address, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, May 1942.
  
  
• “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
  — attributed to Sir Fred Hoyle, 1948
  
  
• “[The Moon] was a sobering sight, but it didn’t have the impact on me, at least, as the view of the Earth did.”
  — Frank Borman, Interview for the PBS TV show Nova, 1999
  
  

Forgetting the Past

• “We got seventy-thousand dead people in that part of the world as the result of Bashar Assad. We as America have never let something like that happen before.”
  — Sen. Saxby Chambliss, CBS Face the Nation, 28 April 2013
  
  
• “To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero, [find source]
  
  
• “Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.”
  — Daniel Boorstin, [find source]
  
  
• “Viewing the whole span of history, tobacco, though more confined as to region, had nearly twice as long a run as gold... In its developed form, the gold standard was a brief experiment, a matter of a few decades, a half-century at most. It was only the sense that it was the final step, the ultimate money, that made it seem so much older.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.”
  — Jared Diamond, The New York Review of Books, 7 June 2012
  
  
• “Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive.”
  — Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan”, 1651
  
  
• “The enormous condescension of posterity.”
  — E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963
  
  
• “More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions [Auschwitz] around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.”
  — Piotr Cywinski, N.Y. Times, 18 Feb 2011
  
  
• “Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?”
  — Winston Churchill on Iraq, cited in Time, 30 July 2006
  
  

History

• “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.”
  — George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature, 1946
  
  
• “At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war.”
  — George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature, 1946
  
  
• “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
  — prob. Karl Rove, quoted by Ron Suskind, N.Y. Times Magazine, 17 Oct 2004
  
  
• “While history may not repeat itself, it is possible that certain human ‘types’ — the cats and dogs among men — do have a continuity that may impress its influence on the times.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, Lippincott 1964
  
  
• “France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.”
  — Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution
  
  
• “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.”
  — Hermann Ebbinghaus, Summary of Psychology, 1908
  
  
• “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, 1963
  
  
• “The point of history is to learn from it, not to proceed as if we were still living in it.”
  — Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, 29 July 2013
  
  
• “I know winners write history. But — not the winners of state and local elections. That would be too much.”
  — Alexandra Petri, Washington Post, 19 Feb 2015 [On the battle over school textbooks.]
  
  

Confidence and Doubt

• “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”
  — Montaigne, Essays, 1580
  
  
• “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
  — Charles Darwin, “The Descent of Man”, 1871
  
  
• “Nothing is better for a firm and solid faith than being in the wrong.”
  — Tim Krabbé, “The Rider”, 1978
  
  
• “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.”
  — Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951
  
  
• “When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.”
  — J.K.Gabraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1954
  
  
• “The Girondins were idealists and it is one of the advantages of idealism that it can be summoned to the support of practically anything.”
  — Stanley Loomis, “The Fatal Friendship”, 1972
  
  
• “When you’re certain you cannot be fooled you become easy to fool.”
  — Penn Teller, magician
  
  
• “There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.”
  — Cicero, De Divinatione
  
  
• “There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so outlandish that he will not find other believers on the Web.”
  —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 2 November 2009
  
  
• “In studying Zen, one must have three things: a foundation of great faith, a zealous determination, and a great feeling of doubt. If one is lacking, it is like a tripod with a broken foot.”
  — Sosan Taesa, Handbook for Zen students
  
  
• “The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”
  — Sam Harris, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, 2004, Norton
  
  
• “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
  — Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”, 2006, Houghton Mifflin
  
  
• “This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.”
  — Christopher Hitchens, N.Y. Times, 16 June 2011, reviewing David Mamet’s “The Secret Knowledge”
  
  
• “I trust [my gut] so much it’s where I put all my food.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 11 Feb 2009
  
  
• “I don’t trust children. They’re here to replace us.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 20 June 2011
  
  
• “If not for a general trust in physics, airlines would have to drag people kicking and screaming to get them on their planes.”
  — Faye Flam, Bloomberg View, 1 May 2017
  
  
• “Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith too? Well we don’t take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing.”
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 7 & 14 August, 2017
  
  
• “Vice President Mike Pence wears his faith like a fluorescent orange vest.”
  — Timothy Egan, N.Y. Times, 30 Aug 2019
  
  

Freedom

• “Freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.”
  — Michael Ledeen, “The Power of Nightmares”, documentary by Adam Curtis, 2005 [This is nonsense. But this is the same guy who said the following.]
  
  
• “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
  — Michael Ledeen, speech at American Enterprise Institute in the early 1990s, in National Review Online
  
  
• “Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”, 1951
  
  
• “The freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.”
  — Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”, 1951
  
  
• “[New] freedoms are usually interpreted to mean sex, drugs, pornography and alcohol, rather than the more intangible freedoms inherent in democracy.”
  — Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune, 4 Jan 2007, about Afghanistan
  
  
• “See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.”
  — George W. Bush, Milwaukee WI, 3 Oct 2003
  
  
• “Freedom is an obvious candidate for an essentially contested concept.”
  — George Lakoff, “The Political Mind”, 2008
  
  

The Human Condition

• “The reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been ... quite highly civilized, there gradually emerged a people ... who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.”
  — H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, 1952
  
  
• “Humans are sprung from the earth not as inhabitants but as spectators of things heavenly and celestial that other animals ignore.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero, “De Natura Deorum”
  
  
• “The deliberate attempt to impose a culture directly and speedily, no matter how backed by good will, is an affront to the human spirit. When such an attempt is backed, not by good will, but by military ruthlessness, it is the greatest conceivable crime against the human spirit.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”, American Journal of Sociology, 1924
  
  
• “One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.”
  — Jared Diamond, The New York Review of Books, 7 June 2012
  
  
• “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
  — Justice Anthony Kennedy, Planned Parenthood v. Casey
  
  
• “For all the surface glitter of his culture, the one thing of value that modern man has achieved is a rather impressive amount of knowledge and understanding of himself and the world. Much of this knowledge is not yet available to large numbers of men; sadly, it is rejected by many others.”
  — F. Clark Howell, “Early Man”, Life Nature Library, 1963
  
  
• “It is part of the philosophical dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.”
  — Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, 1960
  
  

On Writing

• Jerry: “Writing is also one of those things like...I’d rather fill in all the ‘o’s in the phone book. [Laughs]. You know what I mean? Anything is more fun than trying to write songs.”
  Bob: “I’d rather be in the dentist’s chair. The blank page is the most frightening, most horrifing, the most toothy, snarling, god-awful thing I can imagine.”
  Jerry: “Any excuse to not do it is good enough.”
  Bob: “Man, look at those dishes mounting up. How can I work in this pigsty?”
  — Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Guitar Player Magazine, ca. 1993
  
  
• “Because as writers we’ll do anything—organize the closet, clean the garage—to avoid writing.”
  — Lynn Vincent, The New Yorker, 15 Oct 2012
  
  
• “Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.”
  — Clarence Darrow
  
  
• “I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, Radio Times, 14 March 1979
  
  
• “People think that you have these things called ideas and that writing is a matter of imposing them on the subject material, whereas it’s only in the writing that I discover what it is that I think.”
  — Anthony Lane, New Yorker (I think)
  
  
• “Times are bad. Children don’t obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.”
  — Cicero, cited everywhere, but I can’t find the specific source.
  
  
• “Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it’s impossible, it’s like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it’s done.”
  — Lewis Black, in The Onion A.V. Club, June 7 2006
  
  
• “You may have heard the statement: ‘One picture is worth a thousand words.’ Don’t you believe it. ... Consider, for instance, Hamlet’s great soliloquy that begins with ‘To be or not to be,’ the poetic consideration of suicide. It is 260 words long. Can you get across the essence of Hamlet’s thought in a quarter of a picture?”
  — Isaac Asimov, How To Enjoy Writing, Janet and Isaac Asimov, 1987
  
  

A. Solzhenitsyn

And these are just from one (three-volumme) work...

• “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you ‘You are under arrest.’ If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life’s experience, can gasp out only: ‘Me? What for?’”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago One, 1973
  
  
• “Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  
• “Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  
• “The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  
• “I ... caught myself and realized I had always devoted my time and attention to people who fascinated me and were pleasant, who engaged my sympathy, and that as a result I was seeing society like the Moon, always from one side.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Two, 1974
  
  
• “An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  
• “...the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  
• “We were sitting in a Stolypin car at the Kazan station when we heard from the loudspeaker that war had broken out in Korea. After penetrating a firm South Korean defense line to a depth of ten kilometers on the very first day, the North Koreans insisted that they had been attacked. Any imbecile who had been at the front understood that the aggressors were those who had advanced on the first day.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Three, 1976
  
  
• “...a state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny and reinforces it.”
  — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.
  
  

Eric Hoffer

Evil

A lot from another quotable book, plus more.

• “If there were no victims, there would be no evil.”
  — Roy Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, 1997
  
  
• “[A] violent or oppressive event recedes into the past much faster for the perpetrators than for the victims. For the perpetrators, it soon becomes ancient history, whereas the victims may see it as crucial to understanding the present.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “[T]he magnitude gap between perpetrators and victims...makes it very difficult to settle a vendetta or other grievance in a way that both sides will see as fair. Perpetrators see what they do as smaller in scope, importance, and severity than victims see it, and so the victim’s notion of a fair retaliation will be more drastic and extreme than what the original perpetrator thinks is fair. Just when one side thinks things are even, the other side thinks it has been the victim of an outrage that cries out for retaliation.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “The categories that our modern culture perceives as seriously evil are never used as group names. No sports teams call themselves the Child Abusers or the Bigots.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “The myth [of pure evil] encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “The popular mythology of drug use is the modern version of possession by demons.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “The fear of unreasoning chaos is almost as deeply rooted in human nature as the fear of harm.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “A common and important cause of evil is the quest to avenge blows to one’s pride...People who think they’re better than they really are will be the dangerous ones.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “Heavy television viewers are prone to various misconceptions about the world. For example, they tend to believe that there are many more physicians and lawyers than there actually are, because such characters are common on television. Also, [they] gradually come to develop a greater fear of crime than other people, because there is so much crime on television.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “[O]bservers think that other people do things because of the kind of people they are... but... they see their own actions as responding to the situation.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “It is not that cultures place a positive value on violence but that culture dictates when and where (and how much) it is appropriate to lose control. It can encourage violence merely by making it appropriate to let oneself go in response to a broad range of provocations.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “When people intend to do something that might be wrong... they start their rationalizations well in advance, and they make certain that the actions themselves remain consistent with these rationalizations.”
  — Roy Baumeister, op. cit.
  
  
• “...Trump is obsessed with a pseudo-history in which the past exists only as prelude to his own greatness and to the unique evil of his enemies...”
  — Fintan O'Toole, NY Review of Books, 2020-07-23
  
  
• “Once we have labeled someone as ‘evil’ there is often no limit to the cruelty and violence we can feel justified in administering to him...”
  — James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, 2001
  
  
• “[I]t is when we believe ourselves to be acting for the moral good that the most appalling acts can be committed.”
  — Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin, The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood, 2020
  
  

Ayn Rand

• “[‘Atlas Shrugged’] is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand’s equally weighty ‘The Fountainhead.’”
  — Robert Kirsch, L.A. Times, 1957
  
  
• “Rand may not be the worst novelist ever to pick up a pen, but she is without a doubt the worst novelist ever to inspire a cult following and sell zillions of books. Her novels are awe-inspiringly bad, ludicrous on a heroic scale.”
  — Gary Kamiya, L.A. Times, 4 January 1998
  
  
• “[The Fountainhead] is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization. [...] Rand may be, in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk.”
  — Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker, 9 November 2009
  
  
• Mike Wallace: “And then if a man is weak, or a woman is weak, then she is beyond, he is beyond love?” Ayn Rand: “He certainly does not deserve it...”
  — Interview 1959
  
  

Winning & Losing

• “Trump knows how to be the loser’s idea of a winner.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 7 December 2015
  
  
• “[Trump is] a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”
  — Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Vanity Fair 20 Oct 2016
  
  
• “Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser...”
  — Adrian Woolridge, N.Y. Times, 28 Jan 2018
  
  
• “[Trump is] a weak person’s idea of a strong person...”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 24 Mar 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] is the poor man’s caricature of a rich man.”
  — Michael Weiss, NY Review of Books, 2 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Trump has adopted the weak man’s view of what strength looks like, the small man’s view of what greatness looks like, the coward’s conception of heroism.”
  — Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 16 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] is a 7th grade boy‘s fantasy of a tough guy...”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 17 Aug 20121
  
  

More About The Former Guy

There are only a few quotes of Trump, that is a separate task.

• “Trump has an adolescent’s contempt for the suffering of others.”
  — Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 22 Feb 2016
  
  
• “In the broadest sense, the Trump supporter might best be understood as a guy who wakes up one day...from a dream...and then mistakes the dream for the past.”
  — George Saunders, The New Yorker, 11 & 18 July 2016
  
  
• “There is a universal metaphor that states are locations in space: you can enter a state, be deep in some state, and come out that state. If you enter a café and then leave the café , you will be in the same location as before you entered. But that need not be true of states of being. But that was the metaphor used with Brexit; Britons believe that after leaving the EU, things would be as before when the entered the EU. They were wrong. Things changed radically while they were in the EU. That same metaphor is being used by Trump: Make America Great Again. Make America Safe Again. And so on. As if there was some past ideal state that we can go back to just by electing Trump.”
  — George Lakoff, Huffington Post, 24 July 2016
  
  
• “I think I’m much more humble than you would understand.”
  — Donald J. Trump, 60 Minutes, ≈ 18 July 2016
  
  
• “The only thing I’ve ever liked about Donald Trump, the only saving grace, is that he’s not Jewish...Because he’s an anti-Semite’s idea of a Jew.”
  — Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Vanity Fair 20 Oct 2016
  
  
• “A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media... [Trump] owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules — which he can change at any time without any notice.”
  — Alexey Kovalev, The Huffington Post, 12 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Mr. Trump, as someone just talking rather than artfully communicating ideas, has no sense of the tacit understanding that a politician’s utterances are more signals than statements, vehicles meant to convey larger messages.”
  — John McWhorter, N.Y. Times, 22 Jan 2017
  
  
• “[H]e who is devoid of morality is immune to demoralization.”
  — Charles M. Blow, N.Y. Times, 26 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Other countries now need dual sets of policies for everything. The policy that you would have if Donald Trump understood things. And the policy that you have to have if Donald Trump gets mad and lashes out at you.”
  — Yael Eisenstat, quoted in HuffPost 29 Mar 2017
  
  
• “Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.”
  — Charles M. Blow, N.Y. Times, 1 May 2017
  
  
• “[W]atching Trump govern has been like watching a teenager learn how to drive a stick shift.”
  — Jason Linkins, Huffington Post, 10 May 2017
  
  
• “Trump won because he whines.”
  — Charles M Blow, N.Y. Times, 7 Aug 2017
  
  
• “Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible...It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be president.’”
  — Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017 October, The Atlantic
  
  
• “Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 13 Oct 2017
  
  
• “Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our President.”
  — Rep. Diane Black, 12 Dec 2017
  
  
• “Trump appears Nixonian in his disregard for democratic norms, Clintonian in his personal recklessness and beyond Reaganesque in his distance from the details of policy.”
  — Carlos Lozada, Washington Post, 21 Dec 2007
  
  
• “The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not ... the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.”
  — David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] has learned that he can just show up and run his mouth, and he’ll be adored regardless. Some suppose Mr. Trump started talking down deliberately in order to portray folksiness... More likely, Mr. Trump has simply taken the path of least resistance.”
  — John McWhorter, N.Y. Times, 6 Feb 2018
  
  
• “[T]o speak of, say, a sincere sofa is to commit what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’ — sofas are incapable of sincerity — and to speak of this president’s convictions (or plans, or policies) about this or that is a category mistake.”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 24 Mar 2018
  
  
• “We tend to believe that bad things that happen to people in our ingroup are bum luck, while bad things that happen to people in outgroups are evidence of a just universe...Whatever else Trumpism may be, it is the systematic organization of resentment against outgroups...[I]t has given permission for the public expression of shameful sentiments.”
  — Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 17 May 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] buries the signal of his bigotries in the noise of his syntax.”
  — Bret Stephens, N.Y. Times, 18 May 2018
  
  
• “Trump is a walking, talking permission slip for the white supremacist.”
  — Charles M. Blow, N.Y. Times, 31 May 2018”
  
  
• “Bush [W] wanted to remake the world. President Trump, by contrast, just wants to make it up as he goes along.”
  — Carlos Lozada, Washington Post, 13 July 2018
  
  
• “Trump has such a short-term worldview that if something calamitous does not happen immediately after he does something, it bolsters his assumption that he’s bulletproof.”
  — Daniel W. Drezler, Washington Post, March 2018
  
  
• “A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.”
  — Thomas Chatterton Williams, N.Y. Times, 27 Aug 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] is the head-of-state counterpart of the demoralized American worker who responds to the challenges of industrial decline by choosing drug addiction.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 18 June 2018
  
  
• “Con men traditionally skip town. He's [Trump] working the same town.”
  — Bill Maher, 2018-09-14
  
  
• “Like many Trump tweets, it reads like a clumsy translation from the original Russian (‘great patriot farmers’?).”
  — Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times, 11 June 2019
  
  
• “Ivanka and Jared typify the belief that altitude is achievement...”
  — Frank Bruni, N.Y. Times, 3 July 2019
  
  
• “Trump — and many of his supporters and defenders — spew their racism and tell themselves that it is perfectly acceptable when it is read back to them, in much the same way that a dog will eat its own vomit.”
  — Charles Blow, N.Y. Times, 15 July 2019
  
  
• “Most men grow after becoming president; Trump has not only shrunk but has also miniaturized party elders with him.”
  — Nicholas Kristof, N.Y. Times, 21 July 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] is not merely in the way. He is the problem.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 5 Aug 2019
  
  
• “President Trump projects so much that it’s a wonder he hasn’t gotten a job in a movie theater.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 11 Aug 2019
  
  
• “The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon talked about his crimes on secret tapes and Trump tweets about them.”
  — Dan Pfeiffer, Twitter, 29 Aug 2019
  
  
• “When you use people like Kleenex, eventually the Kleenex is filled with snot, and you throw it out. That’s the way Trump treats everyone.”
  — Tony Schwartz, quoted by Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, Washington Post, 11 September 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] speaks as if going to the polls is, above all, a great way for people to earn his love.”
  — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 18 Sep 2019
  
  
• “Everything President Trump accuses his opponents of doing can be understood in one of two ways: as projection or a confession...Trump’s extreme solipsism means he cannot really conceive of anyone who’d behave any differently than he does...he cannot conceive of anyone acting in good faith — with regard to anything.”
  — Elizabeth Spiers, Washington Post, 24 Sep 2019
  
  
• “Trump is television in human form.”
  — Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 4 Oct 2019, summarizing Audience of One by James Poniewozik
  
  
• “Trump is truly the little man behind the curtain.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 12 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[Trump’s] defense has gone from ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’ to ‘Give me back my glove!’”
  — Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ca. 17 Oct 2019
  
  
• “In the Trumpist vision, the 2016 election stands apart from all others. It’s no longer a grant of constitutionally-bounded authority. It becomes a kind of coronation...”
  — Jamelle Bouie, N.Y. Times, 30 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it.”
  — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, 15 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[D]oes it seem like Trump went through all the stages of grief in one tweet? It was like denial (‘I can’t believe I’m getting impeached’), anger (‘I did nothing wrong’), depression (‘This is a terrible thing’), acceptance (‘I guess we can only pray’).”
  — Trevor Noah, The Daily Show, 18 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[Trump’s letter to Pelosi of 17 Dec 2019] reads like a junior high school kid’s break up note...this is apparently something he worked on for days. Frankly, that alone should be an impeachable offense.”
  — Heather Digby Parton, Salon, 18 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] became president, after all, to ensure the news centered on him.”
  — Jim Newell, Slate, 2020-06-01
  
  
• “...Trump is obsessed with a pseudo-history in which the past exists only as prelude to his own greatness and to the unique evil of his enemies...In this demented solipsism, the entire American past is shrink-fitted so that it hugs Trump’s own ample figure, cleaving both to his greatness and to his victimhood as an object of unparalleled persecution.”
  — Fintan O'Toole, NY Review of Books, 2020-07-23
  
  
• “If consistency is a virtue, it’s as close as Trump gets to having one.”
  — Roger Cohen, N.Y. Times, 2020-07-04
  
  
• “[The Trump team’s] guiding philosophy [is] that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing less about it.”
  — Alexandra Petri, Washington Post, 2020-07-16
  
  
• “[A]ny Trump accusation should be presumed to be a confession.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-01
  
  
• “Trump reminds one of someone trying to fake fluency in a foreign language. Over and over, he makes glaring errors because he has no idea what he is talking about.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 2020-09-08
  
  
• “Mitch McConnell [is] a man possessed by the same lust for power and moral turpitude as Trump, but not hobbled by Trump's stupidity or short-sightedness.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-21
  
  
• “Like most such men [abusive fathers], Trump finds the very idea of equality humiliating. He can only abide supremacy.”
  — Lili Loofbourow, Slate, 2020-09-30
  
  
• “I really think we should see Trump getting COVID as the epidemiological equivalent of a mass shooting, where the shooter opens fire on the crowd and then turns the gun on himself.”
  — Naomi Klein, Democracy Now interview, 2020-09-02
  
  
• “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young...I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that.”
  — Donald J. Trump on drugs, 2020-09-08
  
  
• “[D]isplays are essential to the strongman because, unlike democratic leaders, he does not merely represent the will of the people but claims to embody their highest aspirations.”
  — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 2020-10-13
  
  
• “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?...It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.”
  — Senior Republican official, q. Washington Post, 2020-11-09
  
  
• “One thing has become clear these last few days, I am the American People’s ALL-TIME favorite President.”
  — Donald J. Trump, message to mailing list, 2020-11
  
  
• “Trump is a living illustration of why authoritarians worship power so much — because only power can imbue a buffoon as ridiculous as Donald Trump with importance.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-12-03
  
  
• “Our country needs somebody to say [to me], ‘You’re right.’”
  — Donald J. Trump, Facebook speech, 2020-12-03 [Again confusing himself and the coutry]
  
  
• “[T]he typical Trump supporter...sees himself as in on the con. Indeed, the easiest way to hoodwink someone is to convince them that...they’re the ones getting one over on someone else.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-12-22
  
  
• “A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim.”
  — David Maurer, The Big Con, 1940
  
  
• “Trump’s troubling mental state and habitual mendacity ... erode any discernible boundary between falsehood and delusion.”
  — Jeannie Suk Gerson, The New Yorker, 2021-01-04
  
  
• “Everyone loved my phone call.”
  — Donald J. Trump, Speech in Dalton GA, 2021-01-04
  
  
• “[Trump’s] vision never went further than a mirror.”
  — Timothy Snyder, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[W]hile Trump is indeed an ignoramus, his ugly behavior is largely motivated by malice, not stupidity.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2021-01-12
  
  
• “[Trump is] the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”
  — Hogan Gidley, campaign spokesman, Fox News, 2021-01-1?
  
  
• “[T]he archipelago of dots constituting Trump decision-making.”
  — John Bolton, Washington Post, 2021-01-24
  
  
• “[Trump supporters] want their ‘news’ to affirm them rather than inform them.”
  — Frank Luntz, quoted in Washington Post, 2021-02-03
  
  
• “Have you ever seen anybody that is so full of crap?”
  — Donald J. Trump, speech to R.N.C. at Mar-a-Lago, 2021-04-10 [about Anthony Fauci, not himself]
  
  
• “...Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified.”
  — Debra Ell, Republican organizer from Michigan, in N.Y. Times, 2021-05-04
  
  
• “[I]f George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”
  — Donald J. Trump, in I Alone Can Fix It, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, 2021
  
  
• “Trump is an open book who has been reading himself to the nation for 40 years.”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post 2022-03-04
  
  
• “No President has ever suffered like I’ve suffered...”
  — Donald Trump, speech, 2022-03-26
  
  
• “When Trump was having those rallies it was like the comment section coming to life.”
  — D. Watkins, Salon, 2022-03-27
  
  
• “Timelines vary, but all Trump loyalists inevitably end on his enemies list.”
  — Jim Newell, Slate, 2022-03-27 appr.
  
  

The Gender “Battle”

• “Men fear ridicule the way women fear violence.”
  — Gloria Steinem, quoted in The New Yorker, 19 Oct 2015
  
  
• “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them.”
  — Magaret Atwood, paraphrase from Hagey Lecture, U. of Waterloo (9 Feb 1982)
  
  

Contrast and Compare

• “It is necessary that everything be subjected to Soviet power...”
  — Nikolai Lenin, On Workers’ Cooperation, Collected Works vol. 15
  
  
• “[I]t is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
  — Pope Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302-11-08
  
  


• “It is necessary that everyone...be responsible for [their job] — even to the point being ready to face the highest penalty: shooting.”
  — Nikolai Lenin, On Economic Tasks, speech, Collected Works vol. 15
  
  
• “[H]aving to shoot one’s own comrades...is the most bitter experience that can or should happen to a person.”
  — Heinrich Himmler, speech, 14 Oct 1934 [As bitter as being one of those comrades?]
  
  


• “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.”
  — William Shakespeare, King Lear 1.1, 1606
  
  
• “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey!”
  — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 1954
  
  

My Bons Mots

Not that great, but I want to remember them

• “Morality or ethics involving large numbers of people is like physics at high speeds or small scales: our intuition fails us.”
  
  
• “In despair about the dark side of human nature prevailing: the US public cited as 2:1 in favor of attacking Iraq, and it looks like days away. Bush will throw away hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands if not millions of lives, for [reasons that are] essentially nothing.”
  — Journal 17 March 2003
  
  
• “Enlightenment is being on the other side of a mirror: exactly the same except for your perspective.”
  
  
• “Death is like the eye’s blind spot, or the navel: an apparently inert non-thing that actually makes everything else possible.”
  
  
• “The more you understand, the less you can do about it.”
  
  
• “You’ve got to get out of your mind to see God — because God is in everything you’ve banished from your mind.”
  
  
• “Studying the fingerboard is bumping into your living room chair every day and wondering ‘Where did that come from?’”
  
  
• “Going ♯ is like going East; going ♭ like going West.”
  
  
• “LR parsing is trying to reach in your left pocket with your right hand: you can do it, and it returns a correct result, but it’s a wrong-headed approach.”
  — Journal, 5 May 1997
  
  
• “Entropy + topology = karma”
  — 2008. That is, “everything gets out” + “everything is (transitively) connected” = what goes around comes back around.
  
  
• “When people expect you to lie, the best way in the world to be misunderstood is to tell the truth.”
  
  
• “These little bumps? God is polishing me.”
  
  
• “You need to have an Other, because all your observations are comparisons. You line up one thing against another.”
  
  
• “If thoughts are things (‘thinks’) then we do have infinite life.”
  — 14 December 2009
  
  
• “Only if a man has no friends can he tell the truth all the time. And if he tells the truth all the time he will have no friends.”
  
  
• “Hitler was worse than Stalin was worse than Mao was worse than Hitler.” [A non-transitive relation.]
  — 29 January 2011
  
  
• “You can be either widely ignored, or widely misinterpreted.”
  — 2012
  
  

Philosophy

• “The diagnosed ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ who claims that other people are robots has merely arrived, intuitively, at a conclusion toward which a philosopher must labour in a lengthy treatise... A madman is a philosopher who has the courage of his convictions.”
  — Gavin Miller, “R.D. Laing”, Edinburgh Review, 2004
  
  
• “All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.”
  — Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams
  
  
• “To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
  — Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
  
  
• “There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.”
  — Cicero, De Divinatione
  
  
• “Without mathematics one cannot fathom the depths of philosophy; without philosophy one cannot fathom the depths of mathematics; without the two one cannot fathom anything.”
  — Bordas-Memoulins, quoted in A. Rebière: Mathématiques et Mathématiciens, (Paris 1898)
  
  
• “A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things, like existence, that ordinary people take for granted.”
  — Alan Watts
  
  
• “The modern conservative...is engaged...in one of man’s oldest, ...and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty, 13 Dec 1963
  
  
• “In the very books in which philosophers tell us to despise fame, they inscribe their names.”
  — Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Pro Archia Poetia”, fl. 30 BC
  
  
• “What worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.”
  — Daniel Garber, N.Y. Times, 5 October 2014
  
  
• “...a religion is just a fossilized philosophy — a philosophy with the questioning spirit suppressed.”
  — Simon Blackburn, Plato’s Republic: A Biography, 2006
  
  
• “The beginnings of Greek philosophy, therefore, may be viewed as a naive but enormously fruitful projection upon the cosmos of the busy, ordered world of the polis.”
  — William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West, 1990
  
  
• “After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them.”
  — Thomas Nagel, What is it Like to be a Bat?, The Philosophical Review, October 1974
  
  

Owning the Libs

• “[Conservatives] would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for.”
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 12 Sep 2011
  
  
• “The policy conversations and conflicts and basic premises that once governed conservatism — or at least appeared to — have been largely replaced by a set of principles built on the rock-solid foundation of irritating liberals.”
  — Jane Coaston, BuzzFeed.News, 25 July 2017
  
  
• “No policy issue is as important to [some Republicans] as whether they believe they have ruined a liberal’s day.”
  — Paul Waldman, Washington Post, 13 Aug 2019
  
  
• “You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.”
  — Bob Jones III, to W after the 2004 election.
  
  
• “Conservative members would rather break up the United Kingdom, and destroy their own party, than stay in the European Union, according to a new poll.”
  — Adam Bienkov, Business Insider, 18 June 2019
  
  

The General Collection

• “Do not seek to have everything that happens as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it does happen, and your life will be serene.”
  — Epictetus, Encheiridion, 8
  
  
• “Take a note of that; his Lordship says he will turn it over in what he is pleased to call his mind.”
  — Richard Bethell, Lord Westbury
  
  
• “Celebrities are people who are famous for acting in their own self-interest, basically... Heroes are people with a cause larger than themselves.”
  — Landon Jones of People magazine, quoted in L.A. Times, circa 17 Sep 94
  
  
• “Actually, the way we think about most of our problems is by simply going through the motions of thinking.”
  — Alan Watts, Play To Live
  
  
• “No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.”
  — Hesiod, “Works and Days”, c. 700 B.C.
  
  
• “For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
  — Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, 1925
  
  
• “Nothing can be farther from the working musician’s mind than counting, nothing farther from the working mathematician’s mind than singing, and yet there is something common to both.”
  — Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (1973)
  
  
• “No single number and no single tone is what it is without the others.”
  — Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (1973)
  
  
• “Newspapers ... are in the business of telling people what happened. ‘The moon was full, and nothing happened’ may be accurate, but it is not a very interesting headline.”
  —Kelly, Rotton, Culver, Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 85-86
  
  
• “Journalism is there to tell us Jones is dead, even though it didn’t tell us he was alive.”
  — Lord Chesterton
  
  
• “Queerly shaped pieces of flat silver, contrived for purposes known only to their designers, have no place on a well appointed table. So if you use one of these implements for a purpose not intended, it cannot be a breach of etiquette, since etiquette is founded on tradition, and has no rules concerning eccentricities.”
  — Emily Post, Etiquette:The Blue Book of Social Usage, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1927
  
  
• “Parapsychologists claim that a mind can span continents to communicate with other minds; why is it patently unable to jump a few millimeters [the corpus callosum] of uncoupled neural tissue?”
  — Barry L. Beyerstein, referring to split-brain experiments.
  
  
• “Marriage is nine-tenths talk.”
  — H. L. Mencken, diaries
  
  
• When [Senator] Kyl asserted that Americans currently spend more on pantyhose than on nuclear defenses, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D - Greenbrae) sprang to her feet to denounce the weapon. She argued that the Administration has never clearly defined the mission of ‘Star Wars’. “Believe me,” she said, “pantyhose is affordable; ‘Star Wars’ is not. Pantyhose has a clear function; ‘Star Wars’ does not. Pantyhose gives us 100% support; ‘Star Wars’ does not. Pantyhose has a mission that does not change every day; ‘Star Wars’s mission has changed from a protective shield to military installations defense to accidental launch protection to ‘brilliant pebbles’ to terrorist deterrence. ‘Star Wars’ has changed more times than Imelda Marcos has changed her shoes.”
  — L.A. Times, July 1989
  
  
• “If you discover a New Yorker with an open mind, he has probably just suffered a head wound.”
  — Ellen Clark, L.A. Times Book Review, 21 June 92
  
  
• “In mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.”
  — John von Neumann
  
  
• “C. Everett Koop met a high school girl who asked about recommended reading for a future in medicine. ‘I told her to read art, literature, music and history. I said forget about reading cardiology. What you should do now is become as broad as you can.’”
  — Santa Monica Outlook, circa 28 August 1992
  
  
• “In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.”
  — J.W. von Goethe
  
  
• “It is the man not the method that solves the problem.”
  — H. Maschke, Congress of Arts and Sciences, (NY & Boston, 1905)
  
  
• “Though analogy is often misleading, it is the best misleading thing we have.”
  — Samuel Butler
  
  
• “Public opinion has the strange power ... to erase from a man’s character the lines formed there by reason and study; and ... impress on those who engage in politics the passions and feelings of the mob.”
  — Plutarch, Life of Cicero
  
  
• “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
  — Thomas Jefferson (1787)
  
  
• “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.”
  — Benjamin Franklin, cited in Van Doren’s “Benjamin Franklin”
  
  
• “Truth is more likely to emerge from error than from vagueness.”
  — T. H. Huxley
  
  
• “People can put up with almost anything if they can see the reason for it.”
  — Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart
  
  
• “Primary relationships have replaced religion, clan, and mere survival as the foundations of our lives.”
  — Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant!
  
  
• “Many women feel, ‘After all this time, you should know what I want without my telling you.’ Many men feel, ‘After all this time, we should be able to tell each other what we want.’”
  — Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant!
  
  
• “[T]he irritating and clumsy process of dodging someone in the street ... behind a mask of clumsiness, pursues sexual aims.”
  — Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901 [He would say that.]
  
  
• “To look at mathematics without the creative side of it, is to look at a black-and-white photograph of a Cézanne; outlines may be there, but everything that matters is missing.”
  — R. C. Buck, Amer. Math. Monthly, 69:562
  
  
• “If logic is the hygeine of the mathematician, it is not his source of food; the great problems furnish the daily bread on which he thrives.”
  — André Weil, Amer. Math. Monthly, 57:297
  
  
• “Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to man.”
  — André Weil, Amer. Math. Monthly, 61:35
  
  
• “Just as [musical] scales, as the laws of perspective, as the rules of [poetic] metre seem to lack fire, the formal rules of mathematics may appear to be without lustre.”
  — Edward Kasner & James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, Simon & Schuster, 1940
  
  
• “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
  — Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 3, 1788
  
  
• “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”
  — Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1, 1776
  
  
• “Treason is merely a question of dates.”
  — Talleyrand, cited in Loomis
  
  
• “So, with Rousseau, whether in the novels or the political treatises, all is solemn, as though heaviness of manner were in some way the same as weight of idea — a naïve and most un-French assumption, which reminds us that Rousseau, after all, was not French but Swiss and from the canton of Calvin at that.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, Lippincott 1964
  
  
• “To the end Robespierre indulged himself in the illusion that the People was a virtuous and well-intentioned entity separate from the human beings who comprised it.”
  — Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror , Lippincott 1964
  
  
• “Don’t fight forces, use them.”
  — R. Buckminster Fuller, “Shelter”
  
  
• “What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it’s just at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.”
  — Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, Dore Ashton
  
  
• “To a reader, a book is a humanly controllable way of savoring change. ... In life, not just in fictional plots, we all change and we all die. Whether the change is growth, or the dying a final failure, is up to us.”
  — Janet Asimov, How To Enjoy Writing, Janet and Isaac Asimov, 1987
  
  
• “There is a difference between doing some things wrong and deliberate wrong-doing.”
  — George McGovern, N.Y. Times, 11 October 1973
  
  
• “The tongue is the enemy of the neck.”
  — Arab proverb
  
  
• “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.”
  — Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes
  
  
• “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
  — Attributed to Frank Zappa
  
  
• “He is onstage now to die, unrepentant to the last, and breathing the belief of all extremists always — that all misfortune comes from compromise and that only unyieldingness can win out.”
  — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, of Clifford in III Henry VI
  
  
• “An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.”
  — Karl Kraus, Aphorism
  
  
• “A woman is, occasionally, quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.”
  — Karl Kraus, Aphorism
  
  
• “The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”
  — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  
  
• “The three major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — may be considered, respectively, the manic, the depressive, and the psychotic articulation of the prophetic message.”
  — Jack Miles, God, A Biography
  
  
• “Those on the ground floor [of Landsberg Prison] would actually have been very happy indeed but for the unfortunate tendency of ‘the man on the first floor’ to make interminable speeches. Needless to say, ‘the man on the first floor’ was Adolf Hitler.
  One day the conspirators downstairs held a council of war to discuss ways and means of protecting themselves from Adolf’s eloquence. Gregor Strasser had the brilliant idea of trying to persuade him to write a book.”
  — Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, 1940 HM
  
  
• “Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  
  
• “I always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the powers of the state, in the use of their property, and in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than private citizens ever can be ...”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  
  
• “The present [Assembly], by destroying and altering every thing, will leave to their successors apparently nothing popular to do. They [in turn] will be roused by emulation and example to enterprises the boldest and the most absurd.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  
  
• “They [revolutionaries] have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own.”
  — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  
  
• “For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it.”
  — George W. Bush, Philadelphia PA, 14 May 14 2001
  
  
• “Don’t expect to practice [Zen] hard and not experience the weird. Hard practice that evades the unknown makes for a weak commitment.”
  — Kyong Ho, Korean master
  
  
• “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
  — Mark Twain, attribution needed
  
  
• “Zen is prior to logic so called, and its masters are guiding us to an interview with a God who has not yet uttered ‘Let there be light.’”
  — D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture
  
  
• “As is so often the case with brazen falsehoods, certain individuals asserted that they had been present when the deed was done and had witnessed it.”
  — Tacitus, Histories 1.35
  
  
• “There is a magical thing in language design: power and generality tend to come from the removal of crucial limitations, rather than the addition of new features.”
  — Dwight VandenBerghe, on Internet
  
  
• “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.”
  — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare
  
  
• “Entrails don’t care for travel,
  Entrails don’t care for stress:
  Entrails are better kept folded inside you
  For outside, they make a mess.”
  — Connie Bensley, Entrails
  
  
• “He has to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective.”
  — Benjamin Disraeli, speech, House of Commons, 16 December 1852
  
  
• “There have now been many studies of elite performers — concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated.
  “K. Anders Ericsson ... has found that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. But, more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.”
  — Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 28 Jan 2002
  
  
• “Linguistic changes follow social changes very readily, but it is not always a simple matter to make them precede social changes.”
  — Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics
  
  
• “You might as well speak of a rectangle’s having length vs. width.”
  — Peter Richerson of UC Davis, on nature vs. nurture
  
  
• “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.”
  — Berthold Brecht
  
  
• “When smashing monuments, save the pedestals — they always come in handy.”
  — Stanislaw Lec, attribution needed
  
  
• “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”
  — Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, 1928
  
  
• “‘What ho!’ I said.
  ‘What ho!’ said Motty.
  ‘What ho! What ho!’
  ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
  After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.”
  — P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, 1919?
  
  
• “[A Foreign Secretary is] forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.”
  — Harold Macmillan, Newsweek 30 April 1956
  
  
• “Football’s football. If that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be the game it is.”
  — Garth Crooks
  
  
• “Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.”
  — P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores, 1991
  
  
• “A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.”
  — Kenneth Tynan, in Kathleen Tynan, “Life of Kenneth Tynan”, 1987
  
  
• “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”
  — H.L. Mencken, Notebooks, 1956 [regarding the “rhythm” method]
  
  
• “...to men who want to stay in office, the nature of justice is not so clear as to those on the outside.”
  — Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 1962
  
  
• “After each war there is a little less democracy to save.”
  — Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 7 Jan 1951
  
  
• “I think from now on they’re shooting without a script.”
  — George S. Kaufman, on the German invasion of Russia. In Howard Teichmann, “George S. Kaufman”, 1973
  
  
• “The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.”
  — A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War, 1963
  
  
• “The rich are not like us.” — F. Scott. Fitzgerald
  “No, they have more money.” — Ernest Hemingway, attributed response
  “They pay less taxes.” — Peter de Vries, Wash. Post, 30 July 1989
  
  
• “Poor Harold [Vanderbilt], he can live on his income all right, but he no longer can live on the income from his income.”
  — George S. Kaufman, in Howard Teichmann, “George S. Kaufman”, 1973
  
  
• “To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.”
  — Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931
  
  
• “Whence came the intrusive comma on p. 4? It did not fall from the sky.”
  — A.E. Housman to his editor at Richards Press, 3 July 1930
  
  
• “Your close friends tend to know each other, but your acquaintances tend to know people you don’t know. They’re much more your windows on the world.”
  — Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in Science News, 16 Aug 2003 (164:7)
  
  
• “The losers — untold millions of them — have less incentive to pass on the hard lesson they’ve learned than each new generation of dealers has to perpetuate the con.”
  — Todd Seavey in “Energy, Homeopathy, and Hypnosis in Santa Fe”, Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2003, (27:5)
  
  
• “Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.”
  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
  
  
• “Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.”
  — George W. Bush, Washington DC, 25 July 2003
  
  
• “Someone who sees himself as a victim will almost never morally evaluate himself or put limits on his own actions.”
  — Thomas L. Friedman, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”
  
  
• “People who have never really wielded power always have illusions about how much those who have power can really do.”
  — Thomas L. Friedman, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”
  
  
• “You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”
  — Colonel Korn, in “Catch-22”, by Joseph Heller, 1955
  
  
• “Every real leader knew that the occasional outburst of unexplained anger was good for discipline. It set the troops to searching their own conduct for flaws.”
  — Tom Wolfe, “A Man in Full”, 1998
  
  
• “Reading or speaking about the I forces one to look at oneself introspectively. By contrast, an ‘ego’ ... is something that can be studied from the outside, by observing others.”
  — Bruno Bettelheim, “Freud and Man’s Soul”
  
  
• “An inescapable sadness is part of the life of any reflective person.”
  — Bruno Bettelheim, “Freud and Man’s Soul”
  
  
• “Genius is what you do with the mistakes.”
  — Michael Moriarty
  
  
• “When people shout ‘Oh God! Oh God! I’m coming!’ they are not bluffing. Sexual climax is as close as we get to God before our ultimate climax: death.”
  — Phil Marquist
  
  
• “The man who is master of his passions is reason’s slave.”
  — Cyril Connolly
  
  
• “We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.”
  — Howard Nemerov
  
  
• “The use of supernatural or religious explanations for misfortune may be a byproduct of a far more general tendency to see all salient occurrences in terms of social interaction.”
  — Pascal Boyer, “Why Is Religion Natural?” in Skeptical Inquirer Mar/Apr 2004
  
  
• “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling...against character...against practicality...against democracy. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous? Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, 1962
  
  
• “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, 1963
  
  
• “He [the pseudo-conservative] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its own way in the world...cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”, 1954
  
  
• “One strain in Protestant thinking has always looked to economic life not just for its efficacy in producing goods and services but as a vast apparatus of moral discipline, of rewards for virtue and industry and punishments for vice and indolence.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965”
  
  
• “[The far right] believe that their prestige in the community, even indeed their self-esteem, depends on having [their] values honored in public. Status politics seeks not to advance perceived material interests but to express grievances and resentments about such [moral] matters, to press claims upon society to give deference to non-economic values.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965”
  
  
• “Most conservatives are mainly concerned with maintaining a tissue of institutions for whose stability and effectiveness they believe the country’s business and political elites hold responsibility. Goldwater thinks of conservatism as a system of eternal and unchanging ideas and ideals, whose claims upon us must be constantly asserted and honored in full.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”
  
  
• “The pseudo-conservative [holds a] conviction that those who place greater stress on negotiation and accomodation are either engaged in treasonable conspiracy (the Birch Society’s view) or are guilty of well-nigh criminal failings in moral and intellectual fiber (Goldwater’s).”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”
  
  
• “...those who conceive of history not as a sequence of events but as a moral melodrama...”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”
  
  
• “[The far right] moves in the uninhibited mental world of those who neither have nor expect to win responsibility.”
  — Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics”
  
  
• “My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate.”
  — George W. Bush, Washington DC, 21 April 2004
  
  
• “Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.”
  — George W. Bush, interview with Al Arabiya Television, 5 May 2004
  
  
• “When the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn’t serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences.”
  — George W. Bush, Meet The Press, 8 Feb 2004
  
  
• “The ability of the rich and their acolytes to see social virtue in what serves their interest and convenience and to depict as ridiculous or foolish what does not was never better manifested than in their support of gold and their condemnation of paper money.”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “If one is pretending to knowledge one does not have, one cannot ask for explanations...”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “There is reluctance in our time to attribute great consequences to human inadequacy — to what, in a semantically less cautious era, was called stupidity. We wish to believe that deeper social forces control all human action.”
  — John Kenneth Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “As Israel’s own history shows, fighting a stronger opponent will cause a society to unite, but combating a weaker one will cause it to split and disintegrate.”
  — Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld
  
  
• “If a man were to leap off the Eiffel Tower, mathematics could predict how long it would take him to hit the ground, but not why he chose to jump in the first place.”
  — Ian Stewart, “Does God Play Dice?”, 1989
  
  
• “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”
  — Isaac Newton
  
  
• “The comparative importance of a small number of great corporations in the American economy cannot be denied except by those who have a singular immunity to statistical evidence or a striking capacity to manipulate it.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “American Capitalism”, 1952
  
  
• “The existence of market power creates an incentive to the organization of another position of power that neutralizes it.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “American Capitalism”, 1952
  
  
• “It was not possible to combine a highly productive economy and the resulting affluence with a minimal state. [...] Among numerous conservatives there is still a conviction that the minimal state was deliberately destroyed by socialists, planners, etatists, and other wicked men who did not know what they were about, or knew all too well. Far more of the responsibility lies with [Adam] Smith himself. Along with the corporation, his system created the wealth that made his state impossible.”
  — J. K. Galbraith, “Annals of an Abiding Liberal”, c.1965
  
  
• “I think today that a few remarks I might make, we go back to the relationship in this great nation with the people who was the foundation of America, the people that they’ve paid such a price that we might enjoy the blessings of enjoyment that we have, has been spoken this morning.”
  — Evan Mecham, Governor of Arizona (find citation)
  
  
• “I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family — which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be.”
  — J. Danforth Quayle (find citation)
  
  
• “PATRIOTISM, n. The last resort of a scoundrel.”
  — Dr Samuel Johnson
  
  
• “I beg to submit that it [patriotism] is the first.”
  — Ambrose Bierce
  
  
• “The intellect of man is forced to choose
  Perfection of the life or of the work.”
  — W. B. Yeats
  
  
• “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
  — Hermann Goering, interview in Nuremburg by Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946
  
  
• “We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both Classes and Masses. This is especially difficult with the Classes because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.”
  — Lord Salisbury, quoted in H.H. Asquith, Fifty Years of British Parliament, 1926, cited in Tuchman, The Proud Tower
  
  
• “We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work.”
  — George W. Bush, 60 Minutes II, 5 December 2000
  
  
• “People can make significant progress by applying an idea commonplace in one area to a field in which it has less, or no, currency.”
  — Prof. Mark E.J. Newman (UMich Ann Arbor), Science News, 28 Aug 2004
  
  
• “Evangelical nihilism [is the belief that] we wouldn’t be so powerful if we weren’t right.”
  — Cornel West, “Democracy Matters”, 2004
  
  
• “The logic of winning in Vietnam was inescapably the logic of genocide. We did not lose in Vietnam. We chose not to win. If our entry into the war had something to do with preserving our values, so did our exit from it.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Republic, 29 April 1985
  
  
• “Politicians are not essayists; their purpose is not to make themselves clear but to make themselves, and their ideas, acceptable to a fleeting majority.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, 9 September 1996
  
  
• “First Baptist [in Dallas] has long been a bastion of political and theological reaction. At its private school, founded a generation ago to promote racial segregation, young minds are unsullied by Darwinism, unless it is social.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Republic, 28 March 1988
  
  
• “We have swallowed the myth of activist judges without ever tasting or chewing.”
  — Dahlia Lithwick, L.A. Times, 12 Oct 2004
  
  
• “A fanatic does what he thinks the Lord would do if he only knew the facts in the case.”
  — Finley Peter Dunne
  
  
• “But in the Nazi scheme of things one concession from a yielding opponent must lead quickly to another.”
  — William Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, 1959
  
  
• “Every time we agreed to something that was put out there [about mail-in ballots], they’d raise the bar.”
  — Jay Costa, minority leader (D) in Pennsylvania Senate, N.Y. Times, 2020-11-16
  
  
• “In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret.”
  — Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, N.Y. Times 10 Jan 05
  
  
• “A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.”
  — Michael P. Lynch, N.Y. Times 22 June 13
  
  
• “I no longer devote too much attention to unimportant details, and consider the expression of a face more important than the cut of its features.”
  — Ferrucio Busoni, Preface to Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, 1914
  
  
• “Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.”
  — George Santayana
  
  
• “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.”
  — Lyall Watson
  
  
• “Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
  — Tim Krabbé, “The Rider”, 1978
  
  
• “He acted as though youth were in itself a virtue and age a matter of negligence on the part of those who should know better.”
  — Isaac Asimov, “Foundation’s Edge”, 1982
  
  
• “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
  — John 12:24
  
  
• “When you hunt animals you may succeed or not. But when you open the fridge, you will succeed 100 percent of the time.”
  — Nora Volkow, quoted in Science News 3 Sep 2005
  
  
• “About the only positive thing you can say for religion is gets the best out of architects.”
  — Ben Tripp, in Counter Punch, 8/9 Nov 2005
  
  
• “The strange alchemy of time has converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party [while] Republicans are behaving like the radical party, reckless and embittered, dismantling institutions built solidly into our social fabric.”
  — Adlai Stevenson c. 1956
  
  
• “What causes the greatest crimes in history? ... I would say two things: sincere love and a sincere devotion to liberty... If you kill out of love or for a perfect utopia, you never stop killing because human nature is always imperfect.”
  — Peter Viereck, lecture at Mt. Holyoke, 1997
  
  
• “Has it [his opponent’s argument] not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?”
  — Abraham Lincoln, sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate
  
  
• “Break me a fucking give.”
  — Anthony Lane, re Yoda’s syntax, The New Yorker, 2005
  
  
• “The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, 14 Nov 2005
  
  
• “She shunned occasions when she had to comply with the superficial chatter of others by employing a false self to maintain an empty collusion.”
  — R.D. Laing & A. Esterson, “Sanity, Madness, and the Family”, Tavistock 1964
  
  
• “All these [secularized Muslim] societies are the same in one respect, that none of them is based on submission to God. [Islam]... considers all these un-Islamic and illegal.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”
  
  
• “[Western societies have] established assemblies of men which have absolute power to legislate laws, thus usurping the right which belongs to God alone.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”
  
  
• “Thus the humiliation of the common man under communist systems and the exploitation of individuals and nations due to the greed for wealth and imperialism under capitalist systems are but a corollary of rebellion against God’s authority and the denial of the dignity of man given to him by God.”
  — Sayyid Qutb, “Milestones”
  
  
• “Nothing can be more absurd than the idea that we can do something to please or displease an infinite Being.”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “On the Accomplishments of Freethought”, 1890
  
  
• “To practice justice, to love mercy is not enough. You must believe in some incomprehensible creed. You must say ‘Once one is three, and three times one is one.’”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “Thomas Paine”, 1877
  
  
• “The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is that we are different. Therefore the commerce that we call conversation.”
  — Robert Ingersoll, “Free Speech and Honest Thought”, 1888
  
  
• “In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981
  
  
• “An unacknowledged part of the [Islamic] fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited.”
  — V.S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981
  
  
• “I’ve been jailed by the British, the Singaporeans, and the Malaysians. The only people who jailed me in such a way that it was possible to be friendly with them afterwards were the British.”
  — James Puthucheary, quoted in Naipaul, “Among the Believers”, 1981
  
  
• “The proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum to their patients who chew gum.”
  — Hendrik Hertzberg, citing Jon Stewart’s joke, “New Yorker”, 13 March 2006
  
  
• “These kinds of people are the ones who cause all the trouble, and the people wouldn’t bother to riot if there was no one who deviated. These kinds of people should not exist.”
  — Ma’ruf Amin, Indonesian Council of Ulemas, on religious dissenters, quoted in L.A. Times, 20 March 2006
  
  
• “If somebody at one point affirms the truth [belief in God] and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth. This is such a big offense that the penalty can only be death.”
  — Shahnawaz Farooqui, cited in Asia Times, 24 March 2006
  
  
• “Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die.”
  — Abdul Raoulf, Afghan Muslim cleric
  
  
• “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
  — Aldous Huxley
  
  
• “When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”
  — Matt Groening, “Life in Hell”
  
  
• “Everything is a drug; it depends on the dose.”
  — Paracelsus
  
  
• “If drugs are so dangerous and so destructive, why do they need to chemically analyze your urine and hair for trace amounts to determine if you use them?”
  — Unknown
  
  
• “You can talk about the negatives of 4 to 5 percent market share, but it’s kind of like being in the ocean. We’re on the bottom, so it doesn’t matter what the weather is like up top.”
  — Steve Jobs, quoted online 28 Apr 06
  
  
• “I would execute gays only if we catch them indulging in sodomy.”
  — Gary DeMar, in Mother Jones, December 05
  
  
• “He [George W. Bush] is compelled to use language less to express than to control.”
  — Justin A. Frank, “Bush on the Couch”, 2004
  
  
• “Conservatives know the world is a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements for the worse.”
  — George F. Will, quoted in J. Jost et al, “Political Conservatism as Motivated by Social Cognition”, Psych. Bull. of the Amer. Psych. Assoc. 2002, cited in Frank.
  
  
• “Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent.”
  — Anthony Storr, “Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen — A Study of Gurus”, 1996
  
  
• “At the very moment political theory is coming to terms with the end of foundations, political practice is spinning off into a world driven by foundationalist certainties and the attempt to remake political, cultural, and economic power in accordance with them.”
  — Roxanne L. Euben, “Enemy in the Mirror”, Princeton University Press, 1999
  
  
• “Fundamentalism can be understood as part of the larger attempt among various groups and theories to ‘re-enchant’ a world characterized by the experience of disenchantment.”
  — Roxanne L. Euben, “Enemy in the Mirror”, Princeton University Press, 1999
  
  
• “Dictators [in Muslim countries] can forbid parties, they can forbid meetings — they cannot forbid public worship, and they can only to a limited extent control sermons. The more oppressive the regime, the more it helps the fundamentalists by giving them a virtual monopoly of opposition.” Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003
  
  
• “Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims, and proudly identify themselves as such.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003
  
  
• “No one has yet asserted that the destruction of the World Trade Center never happened, though with the passage of time, this will not be beyond the capacity of conspiracy theorists.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “The Crisis of Islam”, 2003
  
  
• “The problem with evidence is it doesn’t always support your opinion.”
  — Stephen Colbert, interviewing Suskind 13 July 06
  
  
• “We were moving forward, and if we didn’t invade someone we would have tripped over our own preparedness.”
  — ibid
  
  
• “[Conservative critics] have been using words like ‘whiners’ and ‘spoiled’ to get parents — and educated mothers in particular — to put up or shut up. And the way they most commonly do this is to recast big social problems as the little personal problems of those who ‘complain’ about them.”
  — Judith Warner, N.Y. Times, 16 July 2006
  
  
• “Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.”
  — cited on the Web
  
  
• “Catching W. off-guard, the really weird thing is his sense of victimization. He’s strangely resentful about the actual core of his job.”
  — Maureen Dowd, 19 July 06, N.Y. Times
  
  
• “There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.”
  — Stanley Fish, N.Y. Times, 22 July 06
  
  
• “Partisans, it turns out, are particularly susceptible to the general human belief that other people are susceptible to propaganda.”
  — Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, 24 July 06, citing research by Lee Ross at Stanford and Richard Perloff at Cleveland State University
  
  
• “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than in the course which the wind blows.”
  — Charles Darwin, cited in L.A. Times, 30 July 2006
  
  
• “The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; ... instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe....They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. ... they prefer the bright, clear problems of war — as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what...”
  — C. Wright Mills, “The Causes of World War Three”, 1958, cited by Alexander Cockburn in CounterPoint, 31 July 2006
  
  
• “News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret; everything else is advertising.”
  — Lord North, cited online 2006
  
  
• “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
  — Bertrand Russell
  
  
• “You are now able to judge a man by how often he prays in a day.”
  — Mohammed Rafik Kamalov, imam in Kyrgyzstan, about institution of Islamic law. L.A. Times, 12 Aug 2006
  
  
• “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
  — Daniel Patrick Moynihan, cited by David Brooks in N.Y. Times, 12 Aug 2006
  
  
• “The last temptation is the greatest treason:
  To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
  — T.S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral”
  
  
• “For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education, it was said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society.”
  — Bernard Lewis, “What Went Wrong?”, 2002
  
  
• “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.”
  — Warren Buffett, 1991, cited in N.Y. Times 17 Sep 2006
  
  
• “[S]how me a pillar [of morality] and I will show you a pervert.”
  — Ben Tripp, CounterPunch, 30 Sep 2006
  
  
• “So long as this obscene display [the waltz] was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society ... we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
  — Times of London 1816, cited in N.Y. Times 18 Oct 2006
  
  
• “I subscribe to the theory that only a creation that speaks to succeeding generations can truly be labeled art.”
  — Charles Schulz
  
  
• “There exists... a whole world of rules which are so generally taken for granted that they are never articulated. The ‘mentally ill’ individual comes to the atttention of his community because he breaks these left-over, residual rules.”
  — Gavin Miller, “R.D. Laing”, Edinburgh Review, 2004
  
  
• “Those who suffer from and complain of their own behaviour are usually classified as ‘neurotic:’ those whose behaviour makes others suffer, and about whom others complain, are usually classified as ‘psychotic.’”
  — Thomas Szasz, “The Second Sin”, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974
  
  
• “Rational decision-making should not be driven primarily by recovery of past costs. If you can no longer justify it in terms of what it will bring in the future and what its realistic prospects are, that is a warning sign you may have become entrapped.”
  — Scott Plous, in Washington Post 4 Dec 2006
  
  
• “It’s like climbing Mt. Everest, only down.”
  — John Hodgman, about running for president, Daily Show, 4 Dec 2006
  
  
• “In all my time in Washington I’ve never seen such smugness, arrogance, or such insufferable moral superiority ... Self-congratulatory. Full of itself. Horrible.”
  — William Bennett, about the Iraq Group Report, on National Review web site
  
  
• “The Bush administration, as usual, has it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the ‘terrorists’ we are fighting in Iraq will come here if we pull out there. Rather, American involvement in 4GW in Iraq will create ‘terrorism’ here from among the people we have sent to fight the war there. Well educated in the ways of successful insurgency, they will come home embittered by a lost war, by friends dead and crippled for life to no purpose. Thanks to America’s de-industrialization, they will return to no jobs, or lousy ‘service’ jobs at minimum wage. Angry, frustrated and futureless, some of them will find new identities and loyalties in gangs and criminal enterprises, where they can put their new talents to work.”
  — William S. Lind, “The Boomerang Effect”, CounterPunch, 6 December 2006
  
  
• “If you don’t get down, it doesn’t count.”
  — Ed Viesturs, about climbing mountains, on the Daily Show, 7 Dec 2006
  
  
• “You don’t outsource the responsibilities of the commander in chief. The whole thing is absurd.”
  — Richard Perle, about the Iraq Group Report, quoted in N.Y. Times 9 Dec 2006
  
  
• “The morbidity...that the psychiatrist has to deal with seems, for the most part, to be not a morbidity of...organic functions but of experience itself.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Cultural Anthropology and Psychology”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 27, 1932
  
  
• “The locus of psychiatry turns out not to be the human organism at all in any fruitful sense of the word but the more intangible, and yet more intelligible, world of human relationships and ideas that such relationships bring forth.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Cultural Anthropology and Psychology”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 27, 1932
  
  
• “In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available.”
  — Sam Harris, L.A. Times, 25 December 2006
  
  
• “The assumption of a Voltaire that Reason for people other than oneself will prevail over the passions, the assumption of a Rousseau that the human spirit, other than one’s own, is perfectible, can only be made in a climate of civilized disciplines in which manners, if not morals, have come to conceal the rude substructure of things.”
  — Stanley Loomis, “The Fatal Friendship”, Avon 1972
  
  
• “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
  — Marie Curie
  
  
• “O wad some Power the giftie gie us
  To see oursels as ithers see us!
  It wad frae mony a blunder free us
  An foolish notion”
  — Robert Burns, “To a Louse”, 1786
  
  
• “If you held hands with your mother, and she held hands with hers, and she with hers, the line would stretch only from New York to Washington before you were holding hands with the ‘missing link’ — the common ancestor with chimpanzees.”
  — Matt Ridley, “Genome”, 1999
  
  
• “Natural selection consumes variation: that is its job.”
  — Matt Ridley, “Genome”, 1999
  
  
• “Some of the most emotionally laden sounds we hear and make are non-speech vocalizations, like moans and groans and oohs and aahs and laughing and crying. If you believe music does not have evolutionary significance you are in a very small minority.”
  — Mark Jude Tramo, Harvard neuroscientist, quoted in Washington Post, 22 Jan 07
  
  
• “A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.”
  — Old English proverb, cited by Shippey in “J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century”, Houghton-Mifflin 2000
  
  
• “One can never tell for sure, in The Lord of the Rings, whether the danger of the Ring comes from inside, and is sinful, or from outside, and is merely hostile.”
  — Tom Shippey, “J.R.R. Tolkein: Author of the Century”, Houghton-Mifflin, 2000
  
  
• “Powerful nations tend to win wars when all they seek is an opponent’s submission, but tend to lose when victory requires an opponent’s cooperation.”
  — Shankar Vedantam, synopsizing Patricia Sullivan in Washington Post 29 Jan 07
  
  
• “Much of what [Amory Lovins] recommends sounds just too good to be true, the econometric version of ‘Shed pounds by eating chocolate!’”
  — Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 22 Jan 2007
  
  
• “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
  — Marshall McCluhan, quoted by Amory Lovins
  
  
• “Most Sunni Muslims can’t pray behind a Shiite because if you are praying differently from the way the leader is, then it doesn’t work, it’s not valid.”
  — Ramy Shabana, president of the Muslim Association of U Michigan Dearborn, quoted in N.Y. Times, 4 Feb 07
  
  
• “Instead of aiming for the stars, the greatest power on earth is bogged down in poorly navigated conflicts with ancient tribes and brutes in caves.”
  — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times 28 Feb 07
  
  
• “Growing up in Minnesota in the 1950s, my mother used to tell me to finish my dinner, because people in India and China were starving. I tell my girls, ‘Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your jobs.’”
  — Tom Friedman, lecture in Santa Barbara, quoted in SB News-Press, 1 March 07
  
  
• “Put any two science types in a room together and they’ll find lots to talk about. Whereas if you put them with someone chosen at random from the population, they might struggle with small talk on subjects like sports, TV, shopping, and Hollywood movies.”
  — Anne Lambert, founder of Science Connection, Discover Magazine, Feb 07
  
  
• “The British are often accused of living in the past — a charge they may self-congratulatingly accept — but the French in this mode run them very close.”
  — Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books, 29 March 2007
  
  
• “Metaphors are dangerous things that prove nothing.”
  — Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”, American Journal of Sociology, 1924
  
  
• “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify making their life a hell in this.”
  — R.D. Tawney, British historian, cited in “Wealth and Democracy”, Kevin Phillips, 2002
  
  
• “The only way to match [the film Transformers’] median sound level would be to blow up a trombone factory.”
  — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2007
  
  
• “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
  — Thomas Jefferson, first inaugural address.
  
  
• “Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?”
  — Jules Feiffer
  
  
• “Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing the personal one.”
  — Sigmund Freud
  
  
• “The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.”
  — Huang Po
  
  
• “Instant coffee ... is a well-deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.”
  — Alan Watts, “Does It Matter?”, Vintage Books, 1968
  
  
• “But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.”
  — Gloria Steinem, on Obama vs. Hillary, N.Y. Times 8 Jan 08
  
  
• “There seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it.”
  — Steven Pinker, N.Y. Times 13 Jan 08
  
  
• “I’ve never seen someone help himself by explaining himself.”
  — Barry Langberg, N.Y. Times 13 Jan 08, on why your lawyer should talk for you
  
  
• “The wise man will love; all others will desire.”
  — Afranius
  
  
• “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
  — John Stuart Mill, citation needed
  
  
• “People who come from traumatic backgrounds gravitate toward the solution of becoming a celebrity.”
  — Dr. Drew Pinsky, L.A. Times 10 Feb 08
  
  
• “Americans end a meal by saying ‘I’m full.’ The French end a meal by saying ‘That was delicious.’”
  — Clotaire Rapaille, The Culture Code, Broadway Books, 2006
  
  
• “He’s a crackhead, a celebrity addicted to human lips resting on the crack of his/her rear end.”
  — Jason Whitlock on Roger Clemens, Fox Sports 11 Feb 08
  
  
• “That’s like asking me, ‘If people sprout two heads, should they wear two little hats or one big one?’ I can’t get with that assumption.”
  — Leonore Tiefer, on questions whose premises are dubious. — N.Y. Times 13 Mar 08
  
  
• “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”
  — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, comparing the morning paper to morning prayers
  
  
• “[T]he out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.”
  — Rebecca Solnit, L.A. Times, 13 Apr 2008
  
• “Watching Bush speak you realize he’s a really dumb person who thinks everyone in the room is even dumber than he is.”
  — Duncan Black, blog 4 May 2008
  
  
• “The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it... Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.”
  — Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, 2006
  
  
• “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
  — Albert Einstein, on atheists
  
  
• “Don’t you understand that men need more money to take care of their families?”
  — Cited as one of 10 rudest [I’d say dumbest] questions, re gender income inequality, in Washington Post 18 June 2008
  
  
• “Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity.”
  — Albert Einstein
  
  
• “In the depths of the malady [depression], getting a stamp on a letter is a day’s work.”
  — Dick Cavett, “Smiling Through”, N.Y. Times, 27 June 2008
  
  
• “You don’t get it [depression] until you got it.”
  — Mike Johnson, in response to Cavett
  
  
• “Depression is no longer the enemy, but rather an old if bothersome friend, whose advice I no longer take.”
  — Jan McLaughlin, in response to Cavett
  
  
• “We must all now trust that this man who can’t hold his liquor will be able to hold near-absolute power without getting drunk on it.”
  — Chris Floyd, 21 September, 2001, about George W. Bush
  
  
• “By raising the level of fear around you, your own fear seems more normal and socially acceptable.”
  — Philip Zimbardo, in Newsweek, cited by Bugliosi in “Helter Skelter”
  
  
• “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
  — Michael Pollan, “Why Mow?”
  
  
• “Republicans lump environmentalists in the same category with abortionists, gays, feminists, food stamp recipients, trade unionists and terrorists. To a Republican, saving America means prevailing over these people.”
  — Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, 11 Aug 2008
  
  
• “The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”
  — Zalmay Khalilzad, ca. 14 Aug 2008 [Note the “in Europe” caveat.]
  
  
• “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”
  — George W. Bush, ca. 14 Aug 2008
  
  
• “As far as [A.L. Tibawi] was concerned, ‘scientific detachment’ could only be achieved by submitting to Islam. ... It must have been difficult for him to harbour so much resentment and still feel that life was worth living.”
  — Robert Irwin, “Dangerous Knowledge”, 2006
  
  
• “[Galen’s medicine] was a systematic way of misunderstanding the world.”
  — Robert Irwin, “Dangerous Knowledge”, 2006
  
  
• “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”
  — George W. Bush, quoted by Paul Krugman in N.Y. Times 30 Aug 2008
  
  
• “Win32 is a big API; it’s really huge, many thousands of API calls, and it’s totally inconsistent. It’s inconsistent in every way imaginable...Every little bit has got to be learned from scratch, because it's a schizophrenic mess.”
  — Peter Bright, Ars Technica, 21 April 2008
  
  
• “His [John McCain’s] voice makes the hum of a refrigerator coil sound like Martin Luther King.”
  — Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, 2 Sep 2008
  
  
• “Joe Lieberman crosses party lines every time he pats himself on the back.”
  — Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, 3 September 2008
  
  
• “There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. He did not make his money alone.”
  — George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”, 2004
  
  
• “Fear triggers the strict father model.”
  — George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”, 2004
  
  
• “Although aspirin is well known for its relief of headache, headache is not caused by a shortage of aspirin in the body.”
  — Irving Gottesman, “Schizophrenia Genesis”, 1991
  
  
• “Compulsive personalities don’t usually come for treatment of their habits. Their complaints are about everybody else.”
  — Judith Rapoport, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing”, 1989
  
  
• “Nothing seems clearer than that we are responsible for our behavior... so we appeal to willpower in the devout belief that we can think our way to mental health. ... When it comes to mental illness, we are all Christian Scientists.”
  — Edward Dolnick, “Madness on the Couch”, 1998
  
  
• “As the psychoanalyst’s joke had it, the person who arrives at a party early is anxious; the one who arrives on time is compulsive; and the one who arrives late is hostile.”
  — Edward Dolnick, “Madness on the Couch”, 1998
  
  
• “Given inflation, people yearn for stable prices. If there is stability, then high taxation, a sluggish economy, unemployment becomes the greater menace.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “It has been suggested that any organization that has been perfected as to form is already in decline.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime. So change comes not from men and women changing their minds but from the change from one generation to the next.”
  — John K. Galbraith, “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, 1975
  
  
• “It will take time to restore chaos...”
  — George W. Bush, 13 April 2003
  
  
• “You have to do violence to human experience to assume there is not an intangible realm.”
  — Rabbi David J. Wolpe, N.Y. Times, 3 Nov 2008
  
  
• “They steered by the lights of passing ships rather than the stars.”
  — Carter Eskew, on McCain’s campaign, 6 Nov 2008
  
  
• “He doesn’t change his principles or his policies.”
  — Dana Perino, on the presidential transition, 7 Nov 2008
  [So you have either to start out perfect, or be wrong forever.]
  
  
• “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
  — Samuel Johnson
  
  
• “At any time in the past, be it 100, 1000, even 10,000 years ago, there was only one woman alive at the time from whom you have inherited your mDNA.”
  — Bryan Sykes, “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts”, 2006
  
  
• “You might not be as smart as people think you are.”
  — Mia Duncan, to me, 12 April 2009
  
  
• “The Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.”
  — Bob Herbert, N.Y. Times, 24 April 2009
  
  
• “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
  — Sinclair Lewis
  
  
• “Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.”
  — Henry Adams
  
  
• “If Obama ended world hunger, they’d accuse him of promoting obesity.”
  — Eugene Robinson, N.Y. Times 13 Oct 09
  
  
• “In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don’t apply. There’s no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.”
  — J.K. Galbraith
  
  
• “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
  — Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 2000, from Project for a New American Century
  
  
• “Moderates by definition have no principles.”
  — Rush Limbaugh, 2 November 2009
  
  
• “If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “The entrepreneur, in the classic image, was supposed to have taken a risk, not only with his money but with his very career; but once the founder of a business has taken the big jump he does not usually take serious risks as he comes to enjoy the accumulation of advantages that lead him into great fortune. If there is any risk, someone else is usually taking it. Of late, that someone else... has been the government of the United States. If a middle-class businessman is in debt for $50,000, he may well be in trouble. But if a man manages to get into debt for $2 million, his creditors, if they can, may well find it convenient to produce chances for his making money in order to repay them.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “The chief executives, it is often said, ought really to be allowed to run the government, for if only such men were in charge there would be no waste, no corruption, no infiltration.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “In the last few years, big banks have found many surprising ways to lose billions of dollars... But few can match the odd tale involving Kazakhstan and a little-known bank that many Western financiers wish had remained so to them.”
  — Landon Thomas Jr., N.Y. Times, 28 November 2009
  
  
• “There have developed in this standing army... certain gratifications which even men of violence want: the security of a job, but more, the calculable glory of living according to a rigid code of honor.”
  — C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
  
  
• “Man is a megalomaniac among animals — if he sees mountains he will try to imitate them by pyramids, and if he sees some grand process like evolution, and thinks it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too.”
  — Hermann J. Muller [Find citation]
  
  
• “A one language world would be an unbearable world, in which people would be bored to death.”
  — Claude Hagège, N.Y. Times, 16 December 2009
  
  
• “Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it.”
  — Gikas A. Hardouvelis, Greek economist, quoted in N.Y. Times 13 Feb 2010
  
  
• “The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic... In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.”
  — George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
  
  
• “Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.”
  — George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
  
  
• “To be is to be the value of a variable.”
  — Willard Van Orman Quine [Find citation]
  
  
• “Esse is percipi.”
  — [To be is to be perceived] George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710 [He used the English “is” rather than the Latin “est”.]
  
  
• “Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.”
  — Deborah Loewenbert Ball, professor at Michigan State, quoted in N.Y. Times 2 March 2010
  
  
• “Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.”
  — Alan Watts
  
  
• “To incarnate, to express your inspiration. To bring Heaven down to Earth... But there’s no way of pointing it out unless you do something skillful.”
  — Alan Watts discussing art
  
  
• “What is the whole test and canon of sanity in almost any society? A person is sane if he gets the cues as to whether words or action or gesture are intended seriously or intended playfully.”
  — Alan Watts, “The Proscenium Arch”
  
  
• “It might well be that... when we all die, all our cells suddenly say ‘God is dead’, and they have their big theological controversy.”
  — Alan Watts, Transcending Duality
  
  
• “The French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it.”
  — Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990
  
  
• “Art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself.”
  — Michael Kimmelman, N.Y. Times, 14 April 2010
  
  
• “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble [of earthquakes]? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”
  — Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, Iranian cleric, in Associated Press, 19 April 2010
  
  
• “Peace is anything but passive.”
  — Santos Rico, in the Santa Barbara Independent, 22 April 2010
  
  
• “Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.”
  — Karl Kraus
  
  
• “Sexual Repression: The Malady That Considers Itself the Remedy”
  — Christopher Ryan, Psychology Today, 20 April 2010
  
  
• “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”
  — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
  
  
• “They [Tea Party Jacobins] don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules.”
  — Mark Lilla, NY Review of Books, 27 May 2010
  
  
• “If a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”
  — Helen Ukpabio, Unveiling the Mysteries of Witchcraft
  
  
• “You know, there really should be a special tag for sarcastic links to make them show up in a different color.”
  — The Macalope, Macworld.com, 22 May 2010
  
  
• “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”
  — Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, 2010
  
  
• “Once a preference is acquired, most people do not change it, but simply obey it.”
  — Internal memorandum at Frito-Lay, 1979, cited in N.Y. Times, 29 May 2010
  
  
• “I am speaking here all the time of psychotic patients (i.e. as most people immediately say to themselves, not you or me).”
  — R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, 1960
  
  
• “Sterligov, like most plutocrats, immunized himself from criticism and convinced himself that everyone was simply jealous.”
  — David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 1994
  
  
• “... there were at least a few persons who seem to think the [Vietnam] war is some kind of presidential prerogative which we must not allow college boys or effeminate professors to infringe.”
  — D.P. Moynihan, Nixon Presidential Library Document, October 1969
  
  
• “In America, there has been a tendency to divide foreign policy into two schools of thought. One that identifies foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry and another that treats it as a subdivision of theology.”
  — Henry Kissinger, World Affairs Council, 1999
  
  
• “Palin is all cheer and no leader.”
  — Charles M. Blow, N.Y. Times, 16 July 2010
  
  
• “You can state mini themes that will exist in 3 or exist in 4, and you can play stuff that comes around on the 1 in the most unlikely of ways. It doesn’t take that much work. What you don’t want to do when you’re playing in 7/4 is to wrap up things neatly in 7. You’ve got to state things in at least 14-beat patterns.”
  — Bob Weir, Acoustic Guitar magazine, August 2008
  
  
• “War is a beast that needs death, so it doesn’t die itself.”
  — Samuel Maoz, Lebanon (film), 2010
  
  
• “... I am utterly convinced that one day the millions who now curse us will salute with us what we have labored so hard to create: the new German Reich in all its greatness, in all its honor, might, glory, and justice! Amen.”
  — Adolf Hitler, ca. Feb 1933, ending his speech with the Hebrew word “Amen” (אָמֵן) which means “So be it”. Seen and heard in “Hitler: A Career” by Joachim Fest & Christian Herrendoerfer
  
  
• “As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple knows, people will say almost anything to an old lady they assume to be stupid.”
  — Ann Jones, Huffington Post, 1 August 2010
  
  
• “I want my kids to know when I’m pissed, when I’m happy, and when I’m confounded. Your face tells a story ... and it shouldn’t be a story about your drive to the doctor’s office.”
  — Julia Roberts, about plastic surgery, Elle magazine, September 2010
  
  
• “The new definition of a sports hero is someone whom we don’t yet have enough information on.”
  — Michael Sokolove, N.Y. Times, 7 August 2010
  
  
• “We’re pushing aside some of the conservative old bulls. What the conservative movement is, what it stands for, is changing pretty rapidly.”
  — Adam Brandon, quoted in TIME, 27 August 2010. He didn’t say this with any apparent sense of irony.
  
  
• “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?”
  — Newt Gingrich, National Review Online, 11 Sep 2010
  
  
• “If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.”
  — Louis Brandeis Check this quote!
  
  
• “I’ve learned that people lie about themselves, and that they don’t really know what other people are like. They just have incredibly big blind spots.”
  — Christopher K. Travis, interior designer, N.Y. Times 28 Oct 2010
  
  
• “Doing nothing is very hard to do — you never know when you’re finished.”
  — Leslie Nielsen, attributed by Steven Zeitchik in L.A. Times 29 Nov 2010
  
  
• “For [George W.] Bush, making decisions is an identity question. Who am I?”
  — George Packer, New Yorker, 29 Nov 2010
  
  
• “Its foundations [the Confederate government] are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”
  — Alexander Stephens, VP of the Confederacy, “Cornerstone Speech”, 21 March 1861
  
  
• “The representative of the supreme leader at the University of Yazd said that since the skin of one’s elbow is similar to the skin of a man’s testicles, people should refrain from wearing short-sleeved shirts.”
  — Kambiz Hosseini, host of “Parazit”, quoted 31 December 2010, Washington Post
  
  
• “The media is like the world’s worst paramedics: they declare people dead when they’re napping.”
  — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, 3 January 2011
  
  
• “It’s not easy to take a computer-generated shark that can walk on a beach with octopus legs and make it seem believable.”
  — Roger Corman, N.Y. Times, 14 Jan 2011
  
  
• “In our own day, millions fuse the real lives and the screen lives of movie actors, assign the combination an importance greater than any they concede to the real human beings whom they know, and then suffer the melancholy consequences.”
  — Jack Miles, “God A Biography”, Vintage, 1995
  
  
• “No one can make a claim to the right to a nuptial ceremony.”
  — Pope Benedict XVI, 22 Jan 2011
  
  
• “The first impact of a tiger attack does not come from the tiger itself, but from the roar, which ... has the effect of separating you from yourself.”
  — John Vaillant, “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”, 2011
  
  
• “Unconstrained by concrete concerns for what will happen to any population that supports them, deracinated jihadis can seriously consider any manner of attack.”
  — Scott Atran, “Talking to the Enemy”, 2010
  
  
• “To kill and die with friends... almost invariably involves deep love of one’s group. Hatred of others may not even be necessary, only a fathomless lack of empathy and concern is.”
  — Scott Atran, “Talking to the Enemy”, 2010
  
  
• “[The President] proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses.”
  — E.L. Doctorow, Houston Chronicle, 13 August 2005
  
  
• “Yea, verily, at that time, it is written in the book of Obadiah. A man shall strike his donkey and his nephew’s donkey and anyone in the vicinity of his nephew or the donkey.”
  — “The Life of Brian”, Scene 16
  
  
• “What does gender matter with regard to a well-composed mind, which experiences insight in the light of the dharma?”
  — Gautama Buddha, “Samyutta Nikaya”, c. 500 BC
  
  
• “What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
  — Richard Feynman, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics”, 1964
  
  
• “We more often need to be reminded than informed.”
  — Samuel Johnson
  
  
• “Indonesian activists in the 1990s ... turned their president’s name [Suharto] into a snarky acronym: ‘sudah harus tobat’ (‘should have repented by now’).”
  — Ben Zimmer, N.Y. Times, 12 Feb 2011
  
  
• “Sitting behind the cello underneath the soundboard of the piano is one of the best places in the world when you are small and portable.”
  — David Lindley, Acoustic Guitar, June 2000, No. 90
  
  
• “It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.”
  — V.S. Ramachandran, interview with Errol Morris, 23 June 2010, N.Y. Times
  
  
• “It's like the Holocaust of analogies.”
  — Larry Wilmore, on The Daily Show, 9 March 2011
  
  
• “Rights emerge by bargaining between the powerful and the relatively powerless; they are not simply ‘granted,’ for if they were, there would be none.”
  — Robert Hughes, “The Fatal Shore”, 1986, Vintage
  
  
• “To anyone who has served in Washington there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you’re painted into a corner, then you’re hung out to dry and, finally, you’re framed.”
  — Warren Christopher, 1999, cited in The Telegraph, 20 March 2011
  
  
• “Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.”
  — Judge Alex Kozinski, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 21 Mar 2011
  
  
• “When I hear scientists say ‘The data speak for themselves’ I cringe. Data never speak.”
  — Andrew J. Hoffman, N.Y. Times 9 April 2011
  
  
• “Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
  — Rick Santorum, WEZS radio 29 March 2011
  
  
• “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man ... a conspiracy of infamy, so black, that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall forever be deserving of the maledictions of all.”
  — Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Congressional Record somewhere
  
  
• “Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations.”
  — Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993
  
  
• “In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was ‘Which side are you on?’ and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is ‘What are you?’”
  — Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993
  
  
• “Airworld [air travel] reduces people’s experience to jump cuts, sudden transpositions of scenes with no establishing shots between.”
  — Will Self, quoted by Roger Cohen in N.Y. Times, 16 May 2011
  
  
• “I go into flow playing bridge, but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am merely fidgeting until I die.”
  — Martin Seligman, quoted by John Tierney in N.Y. Times, 16 May 2011
  
  
• “It is almost as though the English language dare not change so much as to render Shakespeare incomprehensible.”
  — Isaac Asimov, “Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare”, 1970
  
  
• “There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
  — W. Somerset Maugham
  
  
• “Actors have to go places deliberately that the rest of us spend our time avoiding if we can.”
  — Nicholas Meyer, L.A. Times, 12 June 2011
  
  
• “More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.”
  — Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ian Sherr, Wall Street Journal, 16 June 2011
  
  
• “But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
  — Lionel Trilling, “The Liberal Imagination”, 1950
  
  
• “It is not he who has not, but he who wants more, who is poor.”
  — Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Epistulae Morales”, fl. AD 40
  
  
• “When we go to train museums, they’re absolutely filled with children with autism.”
  — Liz Syed, quoted in N.Y. Times 13 Aug 2011
  
  
• “The poor here [U.S.A.] see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
  — John Steinbeck
  
  
• “Alcohol is not likely to bring out any impulse that is not already potential in a personality, nor is it likely to cast behavior into patterns for which there is not already significant subsurface predilection. The alcohol merely facilitates expression by narcotizing inhibitory processes... The oil which lubricates the engine of an automobile neither furnishes the energy for its progress nor directs it.”
  — Hervey Cleckley, “The Mask of Sanity”, 1988
  
  
• “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
  — Steve Jobs, Business Week, 25 May 1998
  
  
• “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
  — Steve Jobs, Commencement address, Stanford, 2005
  
  
• “Language, used properly, is clear on its own.”
  — Bill Lancaster, quoted in N.Y. Times, 23 Oct 2011 [Wrong!]
  
  
• “Since he [Fritz Todt] regularly responded to opposition by choosing someone more amenable, over the years he assembled around himself a group of associates who more and more surrendered to his arguments and translated them into action more and more unscrupulously.”
  — Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1970
  
  
• “One woman wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt that she had heard that ‘if Governor Smith is elected president, the pope’s son will be his secretary.’ F.D.R. asked, in his reply, how many sons did the lady think the pope had, and what were their occupations?”
  — Robert A. Slayton, N.Y. Times, 10 Dec 2011
  
  
• “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
  — Warren Buffett, cited in N.Y. Times
  
  
• “There was something wholly new and deliriously weird in the Dead’s sound, and practically everything new in rock ’n’ roll, rock jazz I have heard it called, came out of it.”
  — Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968
  
  
• “What [my mother] taught me [about my father’s death] is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift.”
  — Stephen Colbert, N.Y. Times, 4 Jan 2012
  
  
• “The Freudian high explosives have been worked into firecrackers for the simple to burn their fingers.”
  — Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 1935
  
  
• “‘Funny in private’ is the politician’s equivalent of a band claiming to be really big in Australia...”
  — Mark Leibovitch, N.Y. Times, 3 Feb 2012
  
  
• “Hitler died in Germany, but awoke in Syria.”
  — Ammar Cheikh Omar, quoted in N.Y. Times, 1 Feb 2012
  
  
• “She [Callista Gingrich] feeds his ego like a goose destined for pâté.”
  — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, 5 Feb 2012
  
  
• “Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.”
  — Dick Cavett, N.Y. Times, 24 Feb 2012
  
  
• “The laugh sensation of two continents.”
  — Variety, reviewing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
  
  
• “Envy is the gasoline on which American capitalism runs...”
  — John Lahr, The New Yorker, 26 March 2012
  
  
• “It was truly one of the most majestic examples of something passing in front of something else.”
  — Stephen Colbert, 6 June 2012, on the transit of the sun by Venus
  
  
• “Underlings fear for their careers and are more likely to examine new acquaintances for potential peril. But there’s an unexpected naïveté among the truly powerful; they assume that anyone who has arrived at their desk has survived the scrutiny of handlers.”
  — Franklin Foer, N.Y. Times, 6 July 2012
  
  
• “I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics.”
  — Richard Polt, N.Y. Times, 8 Aug 2012
  
  
• “They’ve [Republicans] learned that you appeal not to an American’s head, but to his gut — it’s a much bigger target.”
  — Bill Maher, Huffington Post, 24 Aug 2012
  
  
• “[D]eep down he [Obama] is a good guy, if you remove him from the context of being president of an empire.”
  — Hugo Chávez, July 2012
  
  
• “Diplomacy mostly consists of managing crazies who are making unreasonable demands in impossible situations with no solutions. And those are just our allies.”
  — Nicholas Kristof, N.Y. Times, 15 Sep 2012
  
  
• “Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
  — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940
  
  
• “All people are most credulous when they are most happy.”
  — Walter Bagehot
  
  
• “It’s easy to get excited about a six-hour surgery with all kinds of technical wizardry. But lending comfort and understanding to someone who is not going to be cured is a tremendous opportunity to deliver care.”
  — Dr. Mark Duncan, The Baltimore Sun, 20 Sep 2010
  
  
• “I just can’t understand where this militaristic itch comes from. Why can’t they find the patience to work out a balanced and collective approach?”
  — Vladimir Putin, on U.S. involvement in Syria, “Россия и меняющийся мир” 5 Oct 2012
  
  
• “The view that one just says whatever one wishes regardless of the company one is keeping is not virtuous honesty or moral heroism, but a kind of moral autism.”
  — Andrew F. March, N.Y. Times, 25 Sep 2012
  
  
• “[A]s President of our country, and Commander-in-Chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so.”
  — Barack Obama, U.N. Speech, 25 Sep 2012
  
  
• “The [Saudi] government really doesn’t want to repeat the experience we had with the guys who went to Afghanistan and Iraq. The damage from Al Qaeda was worse in Saudi Arabia than it was in the U.S.A.”
  — Mshari al-Zaydi, Saudi columnist, quoted in N.Y. Times, 7 Oct 2012
  
  
• “[A]llowing our financiers to run unchecked is about as conservative as leaving the faucet running.”
  — Maurice Manning, N.Y. Times, 5 Nov 2012
  
  
• “Assuming I win, one of the benefits is . . . to get another Weimaraner.”
  — Mitt Romney, Washington Post, 6 Nov 2012
  
  
• “[S]exuality is the area where gay men differ least from straight men: the male in heat is a uniform animal.”
  — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 12 Nov 2012
  
  
• “[C]onservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all.”
  — Frank Rich, New York Magazine, 14 Oct 2012
  
  
• “A world in which no one is ever quiet is a false one; it is a stage, not a world.”
  — James Wood, reviewing Tom Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” in The New Yorker, 15 Oct 2012
  
  
• “In the end, our movement will prevail, which makes compromise on core issues unnecessary.”
  — Robert Jeffress, Washington Post, 15 Nov 2012
  
  
• “The odds that you’ll regret winning the lottery are better than the odds of winning it.”
  — Matt Pearce, L.A. Times, 29 Nov 2012
  
  
• “People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.”
  — Jason Read, Facebook, 29 Dec 2011
  
  
• “‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. War permits one man – if he is a ‘privileged belligerent,’ consistent with the laws of war – to kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children.”
  — Jeh Johnson, 30 Nov 2012, speech in Oxford, cited in N.Y. Times 4 Dec 2012
  
  
• “Does the United States Senate actually serve any purpose these days beyond providing material for Jon Stewart?”
  — Andrew Rosenthal, N.Y. Times 7 Dec 2012
  
  
• “We had to beat them so they would confess.”
  — Adel Amer, quoted in N.Y. Times 11 Dec 2012
  
  
• “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”
  — David Cameron, 2011
  
  
• “The political process can, and in a sense is designed to, ignore the unpopular cause; not so the courts...reading public opinion is not the judges’ job.”
  — David Cole, NY Review of Books, 10 Jan 2013
  
  
• “Somewhere along the line, when you’re playing, you have to decide are we all going to play the same or are we all going to play differently?”
  — Jerry Garcia, video interview 1994
  
  
• “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
  — Robert Benchley, 1930
  
  
• “The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.”
  — Thomas Macaulay, c. 1831
  
  
• “Once you learn about cheating, and you start making some money from it, you’re never going to win square again. God’s not going to let you cheat and have good luck too.”
  — Rod the Hop, in “A Pickpocket’s Tale”, Adam Green, The New Yorker, 7 Jan 2013
  
  
• “[P]orn is terrible sex education...just as watching a car chase in an action movie is a terrible way to learn to drive.”
  — Marty Klein, The Humanist, July/Aug 2012
  
  
• “If I break my wrist, I lose my house.”
  — Susan Zimmerman, N.Y. Times, 3 Feb 2013
  
  
• “If everyone who got shot felt the need to speak to Congress about gun control, we’d never hear the end of it.”
  — The Onion, 31 Jan 2013
  
  
• “After forty hours it wouldn’t be reporting an accident, it would be a confession!”
  — Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987
  
  
• “If you consciously envisioned something that dreadful, then it couldn’t possibly take place, could it ... God or Fate would refuse to be anticipated by a mere mortal, wouldn’t He ... He always insisted on giving His disasters the purity of surprise, didn’t He[?]”
  — Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987
  
  
• “You ever talk to a logical lunatic before? They’re much worse than a plain lunatic.”
  — Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987
  
  
• “[David] Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued that—as an atheist—he was outside the Church’s jurisdiction.”
  — Wikipedia entry, 2013
  
  
• “Art critics ... just don’t get Cantor’s work. This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship; it’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art-banning. ... Cantor’s outrage [about David Wojnarowicz’s art] on behalf of Christians and Christmas is a liminal journey into the cultural ur-wound, exploding our narrow preconceptions of what it means to pander. He posits: in a post-metaphysical world, is there recourse to intersubjective meaning? Sans artifice, each identity is just a senselessly differentiated iteration of routinized tropes. But Cantor’s meta-reification mirrors our own incontrovertible passivity, which thrusts back upon us, reframed, and, in a Habermasian twist, we realize the final affirmative gesture of his solipsistic negation. Thus, Cantor’s art is about the art that isn’t there, making the inaccessible literally inaccessible.”
  — Colbert Report, 8 Dec 2012
  
  
• “Dogging a product for doing exactly what it is meant to do suggests that the problem isn’t with the product, but the reviewer.”
  — Brian Westover, PC Magazine, 1 March 2013
  
  
• “Most of all, we fail because, when the moment comes to confront our shortcomings and open ourselves up to teachers and peers, we panic and deploy our defenses instead.”
  — Ben Orlin, Slate, 29 April 2013
  
  
• “[I]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.”
  — John Maynard Keynes, need citation
  
  
• “[T]he Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students.”
  — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 27 May 2013
  
  
• “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.”
  — Hannah Arendt, The New York Review, 27 Feb 1969
  
  
• “You would never say ‘dilapidated hedge,’ because dilapidated comes from ‘lapis’ which means brick — you could have a dilapidated building but not a hedge.”
  — Martin Amis, Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 July 2013
  
  
• “No second acts to American careers? Nonsense. What is lacking are decent codas.”
  — Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books, 12 September 1968
  
  
• “But why speak of others? Let me now return to myself.”
  — Cicero, On Old Age, §45, 44 BC
  
  
• “Crime [is] the deliberate setting aside of moral considerations.”
  — Paul Berman, The New Republic, 5 May 2010
  
  
• “[I]n the long history of colonial cruelties, [Burke’s] speeches against Hastings and the East India Company were perhaps the first modern instance where the sufferings inflicted upon an occupied people were held up in the capital of the empire and regarded as worthy of compassion, and punishment.”
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 29 July 2013
  
  
• “Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another.”
  — Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 2009
  
  
• “Even if the entire population is diving to extinction, driven down by individual competition, natural selection will still favour the most competitive individuals, right up to the moment when the last one dies.”
  — Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 2009
  
  
• “‘Narrow’ is an adjective the academy should not shun but embrace, for if academic activity cannot be narrowly defined, it loses its shape and becomes indistinguishable from political rallies and partisan exhortation.”
  — Stanley Fish, N.Y. Times, 12 November 2013
  
  
• “[L]ife without end ... worse than Twitter with limitless characters.”
  — Roger Cohen, N.Y. Times, 23 December 2013
  
  
• “Those who leave [a bubble market] early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking — what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands.”
  — George Goodman, The Money Game, 1968
  
  
• “[A] person’s score [on the Daily News Memory Test] is not best predicted by the amount of news they watch on TV, but [by] whether or not they read a daily newspaper.”
  — Claudia Hammond, N.Y. Times, 10 Jan 2014
  
  
• “[C]rime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.”
  — J.K. Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1954
  
  
• “Nothing is so voracious as a losing business.”
  — J.K. Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1954
  
  
• “Most of what we call crime is, from the point of view of the perpetrator, the pursuit of justice.”
  — Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 2011, citing Donald Black, Crime as Social Control
  
  
• “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”
  — George Gerbner, Cited online in obituary, 8 Jan 2006, Peace, Earth & Justice News
  
  
• “Sometimes the price of freedom is what freedom brings.”
  — Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness:Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, 2003
  
  
• “The flip side of democracy is bureaucracy: if everyone counts, everyone must be counted.”
  — Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 7 April 2014
  
  
• “It was Americans, not Russians or Vietnamese, who aroused the bitterest hatred in the [Nixon] Administration.”
  — Jonathan Schell, The Times of Illusion, 1975
  
  
• “Unsatisfied with playing just one part in the national life, even though it was by far the greatest part, the President secretly planned to play all the parts, and to provide the lighting and the sound effects too.”
  — Jonathan Schell, The Times of Illusion, 1975
  
  
• “The Administration was confused about the nature of powers, on the one hand, and rights on the other. The Constitution grants government officers specific, limited powers. Rights are granted to the people, to protect themselves against the abuse of government powers... [T]he officers of the Nixon Administration had fallen into the habit of defending their ‘right’ to take this or that governmental action, as if they were put-upon citizens, not powerful figures in the government.”
  — Jonathan Schell, The Times of Illusion, 1975
  
  
• “When the sleuth and the criminal are united in one person, as they were in the person of the President during the Watergate coverup, one is presented with the spectacle of a man following his own footsteps in circles while taking care never to discover where they lead.”
  — Jonathan Schell, The Times of Illusion, 1975
  
  
• “Every bridge hand you are dealt would be a stupendous miracle if you had written down its exact pattern before the deck was shuffled.”
  — Martin Gardner, The Great Stone Face, Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1985
  
  
• “Victories are won by the armed forces, splendid actors upon a distant stage; but defeat comes to everybody’s doorstep...”
  — Peter Fleming, Invasion 1940, 1956
  
  
• “[W]hen men adopt a course of action whose effects must remain for some time imponderable, they do not look for evidence that they were wrong to adopt it; they look for evidence that they were right.”
  — Peter Fleming, Invasion 1940, 1956
  
  
• “In this era [late 1800s], among the stated reasons for admission were business troubles, childbirth, use of opium, typhoid fever, sunstroke, spiritualism, paralysis, overwork, jealousy, heredity, grief, epilepsy, domestic trouble, disappointment in love, loss in mining stocks, masturbation, sensational reading, syphilis, and excessive study.”
  — Patricia Prestinary, Images of America, Napa State Hospital, 2014
  
  
• “[N]atural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.”
  — E.O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998
  
  
• “The rational mind does not float above the irrational... there are pure theorems in mathematics but no pure thoughts that discover them.”
  — E.O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998
  
  
• “With a second life [afterlife] waiting, suffering can be endured — especially in other people.”
  — E.O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998
  
  
• “[T]hose who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.”
  — E.O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998
  
  
• “We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling, yea, even more bracing, for illusion it is which gives us confidence. This is why many of us fear truth; we consider it a cause of weakness. Yet truth should not be feared, for it alone is beautiful.”
  — Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science
  
  
• “Even a pancake has gesture.”
  — Kimon Nicoaïdes, The Natural Way to Draw, 1941
  
  
• “We’d all have been better off to have read half as many books. Twice.”
  — Dick Cavett, N.Y. Times, 18 Dec 2014
  
  
• “[A] viscosity with a will...a footed void.”
  — Victor Hugo, describing an octopus, Toilers of the Sea, 1866
  
  
• “There are a lot of ideologies out there passionately devoted to not connecting dots.”
  — Rebecca Solnit, in The Guardian, 6 June 2014
  
  
• “The targeting of the archduke thus exemplified one abiding strand in the logic of terrorist movements, namely that reformers and moderates are more to be feared than outright enemies and hardliners.”
  — Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2013
  
  
• “[The Austro-Hungarian empire was] like an egg with two yolks...”
  — Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2013
  
  
• “These principles [guidelines of Office of Legal Counsel] are not simply aspirational.”
  — DOJ OPR Report on OLC memoranda about enhanced interrogation techniques, 29 July 2009
  
  
• “‘The only way to improve things is through violent methods,’ he explained, smiling, as if he had reached the satisfying end of a mathematical proof.”
  — Mikhail Khordorkhovsky, quoted by Julia Ioffe, The New Yorker, 21 Jan 2015
  
  
• “What managers consider a problem is typically what their predecessors considered a solution.”
  — Nicolas Lemann, The New Yorker, 1 Dec 2014
  
  
• “Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.”
  — Darius Rejali, quoted by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 22 & 29 Dec 2014
  
  
• “For Freud, the phantom limb of nationalism remained a haunting appendage.”
  — Richard H. Armstrong, LA Review of Books, 28 Jan 2015
  
  
• “His program consists chiefly of half a dozen negative ideas clothed in generalities. ... The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism.”
  — Cyril Brown, N.Y. Times, 21 Nov 1922 [First mention of Hitler in N.Y. Times]
  
  
• “[T]he human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”
  — Benjamin Rush, 1787, in a paper about the pillory
  
  
• “When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant.”
  — Theodore Alois Buckley, 1899, Introduction to Pope’s translation The Iliad of Homer
  
  
• “Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers.”
  — Alexander Pope, 1899, Preface to his translation The Iliad of Homer
  
  
• “[‘Fifty Shades of Gray’] is not to be confused with ‘Madame Bovary.’ Rather, [it] is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read.”
  — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 23 Feb/2 Mar 2015
  
  
• “For each product, Jobs and Ive would discuss corners ‘for hours and hours.’ She and Ive share a taste for Josef Frank...who once announced...‘No hard corners: humans are soft and shapes should be, too.’”
  — Ian Parker, quoting Laurene Powell Jobs, The New Yorker, 23 Feb/2 Mar 2015
  
  
• “I asked Jeff Williams, the senior vice-president, if the Apple Watch seemed more purely Ive’s than previous company products. After a silence of twenty-five seconds, during which Apple made fifty thousand dollars in profit, he said, ‘Yes.’”
  — Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 23 Feb/2 Mar 2015
  
  
• “[W]hat is ridiculous needs to be named, and the only way to name what is ridiculous is to ridicule it.”
  — Paul Berman, tabletmag.com, 14 Jan 2015
  
  
• “Reading from a prepared script does not qualify anyone to be taken seriously.”
  — Lance Simmens, The Huffington Post, 4 April 2015
  
  
• “What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal.”
  — James Joyce (find citation)
  
  
• “Unlike [with] race, gender and other social divides where group-related attitudes and behaviors are constrained by social norms, there are no corresponding pressures to temper disapproval of political opponents.”
  — Shanto Iyengar, Sean J. Westwood, Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization, June 2014
  
  
• “[W]hen it comes to the director’s take on Tolkien’s world, a better title for all the above movies would be The Battle Fantasies of Peter Jackson.”
  — Ilana Teitelbaum, Enchantment Dispelled, Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 Jan 2013
  
  
• “[I]f you’re on television long enough, you start to think you’d make a good president.”
  — Timothy Egan, N.Y. Times, 8 May 2015
  
  
• “I’m running because of what I see on television.”
  — Lindsey Graham, CBS This Morning, 18 May 2015
  
  
• “[Logic] cannot tell us whether our first, grounding assumptions are true, or how to interpret our final conclusions. Its value, great as it is, comes only at an intermediate stage.”
  — Ian McGilchrist, LA Review of Books, 15 April 2015
  
  
• “Science ... is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public.”
  — Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995
  
  
• “[C]himpanzees ... lack a crucial feature shared by all human natural psychologists ... : they never get to compare notes.” [I.e. they don’t have language.]
  — Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995
  
  
• “[Children] aren’t really learning [to speak] at all, any more than birds learn their feathers.”
  — Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995
  
  
• “When madness is collective, it’s usually not termed madness.”
  — Michele Pridmore-Brown, LA Review of Books, 26 July 2015
  
  
• “Like most Rand characters, Gonda ... is less a person than a speechifying symbol, and her story never rises even a smidgen above the preposterous.”
  — Michiko Kakutani, N.Y. Times, 11 Aug 2015
  
  
• “In social media, friendship gets fixed and mounted.”
  — Emily Witt, N.Y. Times, 23 Aug 2015
  
  
• “Hitler’s basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption...Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion. Both capitalism and communism were Jewish. ”
  — Timothy Snyder, NY Review of Books, 24 September 2015
  
  
• “It is often said that governing is the art of compromise. But this is not a statement about governing; it is rather about the values of democracy.”
  — Jason Stanley, N.Y. Times, 12 Oct 2015
  
  
• “For opposition campaigns, you just have to find the one silver bullet to derail an initiative. Proponents have to defend all aspects of it.”
  — Daniel A. Smith (U of Florida), quoted in CBS Denver, 24 Oct 2015
  
  
• “Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
  — J.K. Galbraith, Economics, Peace, and Laughter, 1971
  
  
• “People in other cultures are generally thought to commit terrible acts for calculated reasons, underscored by some perverse morality that can be readily discounted, so that only the consequences of their actions should be judged, whereas for one’s own group motivation is, and what ought to, mostly count.”
  — Scott Atran, Good Guys Kill Better, Huffington Post, 17 March 2012
  
  
• “Violent extremism represents not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse...”
  — Scott Atran, ISIS is a revolution, Aeon, 2015
  
  
• “Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue...”
  — Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Political Morality, 1794
  
  
• “All novel developments are ‘extremist’ compared with what was the norm before.”
  — Scott Atran, ISIS is a revolution, Aeon, 2015
  
  
• “Media exposure [...] is the oxygen of terror in our age...”
  — Scott Atran, ISIS is a revolution, Aeon, 2015
  
  
• “Sob stories are not a good way to make public policy. The best leaders have a certain enlightened aloofness.”
  — Paul Bloom, quoted by John Tierney, N.Y. Times, 22 Mar 2016
  
  
• “I will confess that something about Reagan always made me cringe. His particular sentimentality smelled like sour milk to me.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet Magazine, 25 Feb 2016
  
  
• “The imaginary college student is a character born of someone else’s pessimism.”
  — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 31 Dec 2015
  
  
• “I do not hate in the plural.”
  — P.G. Wodehouse, attributed
  
  
• “[P]eople won’t remember what other people say about you, but they will remember what you do.”
  — Michelle Obama, talk with Oprah, 14 June 2016
  
  
• “There is ... a sense of the magical power of the word ... the recurrent implication that just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy.”
  — Martin Lipset, Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason, 1970
  
  
• “[W]hat can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
  — Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 20 October 2003
  
  
• “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”
  — Philip Roth, 1961. (Find source.)
  
  
• “In hardship we discover, though we may not recognize it, the parochialism of pain. Pain is all that pain knows, its knowledge is supremely local, and it is for this reason an inadequate position from which to grasp the world. ... Pain has no special access to truth. Reality cannot be correctly understood from the standpoint of a personal injury, individually or collectively.”
  — Leon Wieseltier, Washington Post, 22 June 2016
  
  
• “Hurt people hurt people.”
  — Leon Wieseltier, Washington Post, 22 June 2016 [Surely this has been said before.]
  
  
• “In most cases, political language isn’t meant to convey information at all, but to preserve careers or avoid trouble.”
  — Barton Swaim, L.A. Times, 24 June 2016
  
  
• “Nigel Farage [is] the only British person to ever look uncomfortable holding a pint of beer...”
  — Rich McCormick, The Verge, 24 June 2016
  
  
• “Like shoveling snow, the 400 I.M. is a physically taxing activity best left to the youth.”
  — Karen Crouse, N.Y. Times, 26 June 2016
  
  
• “[T]he more representative the body the less well it is able to deliberate...”
  — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 4 July 2016
  
  
• “The energy and the entropy of the world have no meaning, because such quantities admit of no accurate definition.”
  — Max Planck, Treatise on Thermodynamics §135, 1897
  
  
• “Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.”
  — Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, July/August 2016
  
  
• “When American foreign policy fails, partisans hunt for policymakers’ sinister motives. What we really need to investigate are their good intentions.”
  — Charles Lane, Washington Post, 29 June 2016
  
  
• “Pranksters write in disappearing ink; politicians speak in it.”
  — Frank Bruni, N.Y. Times, 20 July 2016
  
  
• “But soon [Ted] Cruz began to seem like the guy who comes to your book party and starts brandishing his own book.”
  — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, 21 July 2016
  
  
• “My grandparents went for their honeymoon on Iceland’s largest glacier. At that time, the glacier was moving on a geologic scale. Now the glacier is melting and is moving on a human scale. But our human reactions are on a geologic scale.”
  — Andri Snaer, quoted by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 11 & 18 July 2016
  
  
• “The essence of politics is about addition, not subtraction.”
  — Stuart Stevens, quoted by Greg Sargent in N.Y. Times, 26 July 2016
  
  
• “To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.”
  — Umberto Eco, NY Review of Books, 22 June 1995
  
  
• “The funnier candidate always wins.” (Paraphrase of following.) “I said it as a joke, but I think there’s something to it. Reagan was funny. Bill Clinton was funny. Bush was funnier than Gore. Obama was funnier than probably anybody who’s ever run for office.”
  — Judd Apatow interviewed by Maureen Dowd, 15 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Americans today often speak of racial prejudice as a thing that simply exists—like air—with no nod to the actual work it takes to create and maintain systems based upon prejudice.”
  — Annette Gordon-Reed, NY Review of Books, 19 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
  — William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade, 1983
  
  
• “[Music criticism is] the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”
  — Virgil Thomson, letter to detractor, find citation
  
  
• “Instincts are useful and practical if you’re doing the same deal over and over again...But if you find yourself in a new environment...your instincts are the last thing you should be relying on.”
  — Deepak Malhotra, quoted in Washington Post, 27 Mar 2017
  
  
• “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”
  — Hannah Arendt, find citation
  
  
• “One is often asked to [define sanity] especially in courts of law, but the wise man will always avoid doing so when possible.”
  — G.F.W. Ewens, Insanity in India, 1908
  
  
• “Sports media is the malest and palest of them all.”
  — Jessica Luther, quoted in Huffington Post 3 Apr 2017
  
  
• “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
  — Samuel Johnson, Rambler #2, 24 March 1750
  
  
• “Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.”
  — Samuel Johnson, Rambler #137, 9 July 1751
  
  
• “When in early life some people discover that certain limits have been placed on their capacity to ascend socially by such apparent irrelevancies as heredity, early environment, and the social class of their immediate forbears, they go into something like despair, which, if generally secret, is no less destructive.”
  — Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, 1983
  
  
• “If no other institution here confers the titles of nobility forbidden by the Constitution, [colleges and universities] do.”
  — Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, 1983
  
  
• “[I]nsecurity and snobbery, the one propping up the other to produce that delicate equilibrium which sustains the middle class.”
  — Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, 1983
  
  
• “The longer the euphemism the better. As a rule...euphemisms are longer than the words they replace.”
  — Hugh Rawson, Dictionary of Euphemisms and Doubletalk, 1981
  
  
• “To be modern is to exhibit a whole range of uncertainties and pathologies, from Locke’s sense of ‘uneasiness,’ Rousseau’s ‘amour-propre,’ Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness,’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety,’ to Tocqueville’s ‘inquiétude,’ Marx’s ‘alienation,’ and Weber’s ‘disenchantment.’”
  — Steven B. Smith, Modernity and its Discontents, 2017. [And Sartre’s ‘nausea’.]
  
  
• July 11: “Got up late and would have liked to have got up later, which is a sad moral state to be in.” July 19: “Blowing a gale all day. Nothing to do and we did it.”
  — Arthur Conan Doyle, Journal of Arctic voyage, 1880
  
  
• “Please do not interpret what I’m saying tonight to mean anything.”
  — Sean Hannity, Fox TV show, 23 May 2017
  
  
• “Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse...and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up.”
  — Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times, 2 June 2017
  
  
• “The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.”
  — Richard V. Reeves, N.Y. Times, 10 June 2017
  
  
• “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”
  — Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 1988
  
  
• “Accepting one’s thoughts as merely thoughts is very different from treasuring one’s thoughts; one may as well treasure one’s sweat or saliva.”
  — Thomas Joiner, Washington Post, 25 August 2017, on meditation
  
  
• “Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo.”
  — Ian Frazier, 7 May 2015, NY Review of Books
  
  
• “[E]very great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.”
  — Bret Stephens, N.Y. Times, 24 September 2017
  
  
• “[Ulysses S.] Grant drank because he drank because he drank.”
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 2 October 2017
  
  
• “[Nazi] followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future.”
  — Fritz Stern, quoted by Michelle Goldberg, N.Y. Times, 29 September 2017
  
  
• “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”
  — Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, 1756
  
  
• “Today’s sexual freedom is rather like today’s market freedom, in that what it practically entails is freedom for people with power to dictate terms and freedom for everyone else to shut up and smile.”
  — Laurie Penney, longreads.com, Sep 2017
  
  
• “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”
  — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
  
  
• “It’s not so much that people are unhappy, but rather they think that they could be happier and therefore some think they deserve to have an affair.”
  — Esther Perel, LA Review of Books, interview, 28 Oct 2017
  
  
• “Sometimes in the quiet of my study I have found myself bursting out to their [Stalin’s associates] ghosts: ‘For God’s sake, stab him with a knife, or pick up a heavy object and bash his brains out, the lives you save may include your own!’”
  — Robert C. Tucker, quoted in New Yorker, 6 Nov 2017
  
  
• “If you can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage.”
  — Peter Greene, HuffPost, 21 Nov 2017 [About teacher shortages]
  
  
• “[L]ies, by their very nature, have to be changed...”
  — Hannah Arendt, interview with Roger Errera, 1974
  
  
• “Democrats, by and large, want their politicians held accountable. Republicans, by contrast, just want Democratic politicians held accountable.”
  — Michelle Goldberg, N.Y. Times, 7 Dec 2017
  
  
• “Schools are places where you send your child to be brought up by other children.”
  — Alan Watts, Law of Attraction lecture
  
  
• “Below the surface waters of Caesar’s household, where monsters of the deep fed on those weaker than themselves and yet were always hungry...”
  — Tom Holland, Dynasty, 2015
  
  
• “The skills most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the very skills that deteriorate once we have power.”
  — Dacher Keltner, Greater Good Magazine, 1 Dec 2007
  
  
• “[O]ne’s ability to get or maintain power...depends on one’s ability to understand and advance the goals of other group members.”
  — Dacher Keltner, Greater Good Magazine, 1 Dec 2007
  
  
• “Fairness for everyone would be possible only if everyone’s interests were the same...any regime of fairness will always be unfair in the eyes of those for whom it was not designed.”
  — Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, 21 Dec 1994
  
  
• “You don’t redress discrimination simply by stopping it, for its legacy will live on in the form of habits of thought and action now embedded in the fabric of society.”
  — Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, 21 Dec 1994
  
  
• “[T]here might well be more Barbies in the United States than there are people.”
  — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 22 Jan 2018
  
  
• “[I]narticulate fury, once expressed, does not automatically find its true target and become productive. To the contrary, it is specifically prone to being harnessed by smoother tongues to yet more furious, hateful, and divisive ends.”
  — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 6 Feb 2018
  
  
• “Perhaps the hardest thing for humans to do is to imagine the world as it is imagined by others.”
  — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 20 Feb 2018
  
  
• “It is hard to know whether the Soviet authorities were genuinely paranoid or had whipped themselves up into a self-perpetuating moral outrage.”
  — Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, 2002 [Regarding purported Polish espionage.]
  
  
• “What [Himmler] imagined the social order and the experience of the Teutons actually to have been, and why this lost world should represent an ideal, is, it must be said, hard to discover.”
  — Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life, 2008
  
  
• “The urge to fix others comes from wanting to soothe our own unease or anxiety.”
  — Charlene Sanuade, quoted in HuffPost, 27 Mar 2018
  
  
• “[I]t is simply flat-out mythological to suppose that things were more polite in the golden past.”
  — Christopher Hitchens, Bring on the Mud, The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2004
  
  
• “[T]yrants thrive on cliché, on language that declares itself beyond questioning.”
  — Gary Greenberg, The New Yorker, 2 Apr 2018
  
  
• “[I]t is always necessary to be careful that the first symptoms of mental disease are not mistaken for its initial cause. ... Religion is not a cause of insanity... In many, however, and often it is a first symptom.”
  — Insanity in India, G.F.W. Ewens, 1908
  
  
• “Certainly, in the beginning, excesses did occur. Certainly, here and there, innocents were affected.”
  — Hermann Göring, Aufbau einer Nation, Berlin, 1934
  
  
• “[E]verybody knows at this point that if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product being sold.”
  — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, N.Y. Times, 29 Apr 2018
  
  
• “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
  — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
  
  
• “Our people are destined to be the pivot and leaders of the new European order. They must always fight against the temptation to devote their energies to the good of others.”
  — Das Reich, 23 Oct 1940
  
  
• “The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism — an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”
  — Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 20 July 2015
  
  
• “The idea that God has enemies, and needs human help in order to identify and dispose of them, is a little difficult to assimilate.”
  — Bernard Lewis, The Roots of Muslim Rage, The Atlantic, Sep 1990
  
  
• “As Daniel Boorstin understood back in 1962, you can’t refute an image with a fact. Every pseudo-event ‘becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.’”
  — David Brooks, N.Y. Times, 24 May 2018
  
  
• “Among utopian ideas, primitivism is distinctive for its reverse teleology.”
  — Ben Etherington, LA Review of Books, May 2018
  
  
• “The line on the frontier where the barbarians begin is that line where taxes and grain end.”
  — James C. Scott, Against the Grain, 2017
  
  
• “Actions are held [by nationalists] to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side...”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
  — George Orwell, “Arthur Koestler”, 1944
  
  
• “Tolerance is painless to the indifferent and wrenching to the passionate.”
  — David Wolpe, LA Review of Books, 3 June 2018
  
  
• “Conservatives govern without shame and liberals shame without governing.”
  — Bill Maher, 8 June 2018
  
  
• “What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it...He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence – that is, in his own mind.”
  — George Orwell, Antisemitism in Britain, 1945
  
  
• “If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education.”
  — George Orwell, Charles Dickens, 1940
  
  
• “Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary.”
  — George Orwell, Can Socialists be Happy?, 1943
  
  
• “People generally do not vote on how well the government is dealing with a future problem...”
  — Hall, McDonnell, O'Neill, Superbugs, 2018
  
  
• “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”
  — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
  
  
• “The existence of inequality exposes everyone to the risk of being inferior...”
  — James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, 2001
  
  
• “A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim.”
  — David Maurer, The Big Con, 1940
  
  
• “For ordinary working women, leaning in [as per Cheryl Sandberg] would be immediate grounds for termination.”
  — Alissa Quart and Barbara Ehrenreich, NY Review of Books, 19 July 2018
  
  
• “Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible.”
  — Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene, 2016 [I.e. they need catalysis.]
  
  
• “To admire talent ecstatically in all its forms irresistibly leads to introspection, to see if it is not possible to discover some trace or possibility of this choicest of essences in one’s unexplored body or still cloudy soul.”
  — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942
  
  
• “Under normal circumstances, the name a human being bears is no more than the band is to a cigar: a means of identification, a superficial, almost unimportant thing that is only loosely related to the real subject, the true ego. In the event of a success the name begins to swell, so to say. It loosens itself from the human being that bears it and becomes a power in itself, a force, an independent thing, an article of commerce, a capital asset; and psychologically again with strong reaction it becomes a force which tends to influence, to dominate, to transform the person who bears it.”
  — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942
  
  
• “Every newspaper reader in New York, London, or Paris knew more of what was really going on than those of us [in Vienna, Feb 1934] who seemingly were witnesses.”
  — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942
  
  
• “In the last analysis it seems likely that they were wiser than I, all those friends in Vienna, because they suffered everything only when it really happened, whereas I had already suffered the disaster in advance in my fantasy, and then again when it became reality.”
  — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942
  
  
• “Science: essentially math disguised as dinosaurs and outer space in order to seem interesting.”
  — John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, 1 July 2018
  
  
• “Invariably after a few years of revolution, as after a few years of war, after anything which has led to an ecstatic outburst of community feeling, the irresistible egoism of the individual and of the family comes once more into its own.”
  — Stefan Zweig, Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician, 1930
  
  
• “However cautious and determined people are when they begin [gambling], their good judgment goes out the window once they start to win.”
  — Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors, 2018
  
  
• “The problem isn’t that our national character is too invested in civility. It’s that a certain segment of our population is desperate to be freed from it.”
  — Lili Loofbourow, Slate, 19 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Democracy is a hard-won, easily rolled back state of affairs from which many secretly yearn to be released.”
  — Uki Goñi, NY Review of Books, 20 Aug 2018
  
  
• “One might say that the English take pride in their sense of irony, though pride is not quite the right word for the national commitment to a mode of discourse that depends so entirely upon understatement.”
  — Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, 27 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Just as most soldiers believe bullets will hit only others, not themselves, most citizens like to think that their own minds and thought processes are invulnerable.”
  — Margaret Singer, Idea, 19 Jan 1996
  
  
• “The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: ‘I am rereading...’ and never ‘I am reading...’”
  — Italo Calvino, NY Review of Books,9 Oct 1986
  
  
• “Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women...The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”
  — Nicholas Syrett, The Company He Keeps, 2009
  
  
• “I guess the irony of being a great nation is the only power who can bring you down is yourself.”
  — Col. Mark Mykleby, quoted by Thomas L. Friedman, N.Y. Times, 2 Oct 2018
  
  
• “[Lindsey Graham] rushes to [TV cameras] the way a toddler chases soap bubbles.”
  — Frank Bruni, N.Y. Times, 6 Oct 2018
  
  
• “[A]t root, any dictatorship appeals to the lowest instincts of the governed: fear, aggressiveness toward one’s neighbors, bootlicking. Terror most effectively excites such instincts...”
  — Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, 1982
  
  
• “The forms through which a crowd can express its yearnings are extraordinarily meager and continually repeat themselves: the demonstration, the strike, the rally, the barricades. That is why you can write a novel about a man, but about a crowd — never.”
  — Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, 1982
  
  
• “The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.”
  — James Hamblin, The Atlantic, 3 Jan 2018
  
  
• “...the propensity to leak is stronger than the sex drive.”
  — George H.W. Bush, note to Maureen Dowd, quoted in N.Y. Times, 2 Dec 2018
  
  
• “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
  — Brian Kernighan, find citation
  
  
• “The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.”
  — Stuart L. Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, 2009
  
  
• “I have a sense of ethics that is as high as anybody you can imagine.”
  — Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker, 21 Jan 2019
  
  
• “Nowhere in the animal world is self-denial important for survival.”
  — Nathan H. Lents, Not So Different, 2016
  
  
• “[T]he human psyche has a resilient ability to self-injure.”
  — Nathan H. Lents, Not So Different, 2016
  
  
• “[W]e find it easier, on the whole, to admire Socrates than to envy him; to adore the Cross, especially on cloudy Sundays, than to carry it.”
  — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 1955
  
  
• “Ivanka is white, wealthy, and beautiful, and these attributes often pass as moral virtues.”
  — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 29 Nov 2016
  
  
• “The minute you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted you’re not going to succeed.”
  — Elizabeth Holmes, quoted by Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair, 26 Feb 2019, [find original source][This is the sort of nonsense I have quit a job over.]
  
  
• “There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.”
  — David Foster Wallace, How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, 2006 anthology, originally in Philadelphia Inquirer
  
  
• “Orwell’s ‘1984’ had the ‘Two Minutes Hate.’ Fox’s hate lasts for hours.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 11 Apr 2019
  
  
• “There’s this Hollywood stereotype that coders sit there just pouring code out all day long. Really what they do is sit there staring at busted code that isn’t working, trying to figure out how to fix it. This is one of the most Sisyphean tasks you’re ever going to do in your life. It’s not going to get any better, because the better you get, the harder the challenges will be.”
  — Clive Thompson, interviewed by Jennifer Oulette, Ars Technica, 8 Apr 2019
  
  
• “Hatred has the unique quality, among the emotions, of being discursive. You can be happy or melancholy or heartbroken without saying so. But to hate is to vent.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 27 Jan 2019
  
  
• “The whole truth would be an infinite concatenation of mostly irrelevant facts... So we do not tell the whole truth; we tell carefully crafted stories, and we do this even when our moral purpose is to tell the truth.”
  — Justin E.H. Smith, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, 2019
  
  
• “The more information they [hedgehogs, i.e. ‘experts’] had to work with, the more easily they could fit any story into their worldview...(Tetlock told me that, when making an argument, foxes often use the word however, while hedgehogs favor moreover.)”
  — David Epstein, citing work by Philip Tetlock, The Atlantic, June 2019
  
  
• “[A] huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler. Otherwise, they can easily be faked by cheaters...If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of [reliable] loyalty.”
  — Yuval Noah Harari, N.Y. Times, 24 May 2019
  
  
• “Most air crew take for granted the spurious moral absolution conferred upon those who escape eye contact with the people whom they kill.”
  — Max Hastings, Vietnam, 2018
  
  
• “[G]oalkeeper is the airplane bathroom of positions. Trying to accommodate more than one person serves no one well.”
  — Graham Hays, espnW.com, 3 July 2019
  
  
• “Large banks are essentially large children in search of candy, except the candy is profits. The only thing preventing them from grabbing all the candy and making themselves sick are laws and regulations, we cannot rely on them to act morally.”
  — Thornton McEnery, abovethelaw.com, 1 July 2019
  
  
• “Nowadays, a successful reporter must be the midwife, or more often the conceiver of his news. By the interview technique, he incites a public figure to make statements which will sound like news.”
  — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1962
  
  
• “[I]n many fields of marketing...a statement cannot be most attractively believable unless it is only partially intelligible.”
  — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1962
  
  
• “[The ‘Billy Graham rule’ is] rather like a thief sanctimoniously announcing that he brings a parole officer every time he goes to the bank to make sure he doesn’t rob it. Good for you, dude, for knowing your own limitations — but it doesn’t make you better than the rest of us, who manage to regularly not steal things even when we’re completely alone.”
  — Monica Hesse, Washington Post, 11 July 2019
  
  
• “What cannot be easily explained is answered by convenient untruths.”
  — Charley Warzel, N.Y. Times, 11 Aug 2019
  
  
• “[I]]t has also been clear since the Obama years that a fair number of the superrich aren’t satisfied with being immensely wealthy; they also want adulation. They expect to be praised as heroic job creators and are enraged at any suggestion that some of their number may have behaved badly, let alone that they may have benefited from a rigged system.”
  — Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times, 13 Aug 2019
  
  
• “It’s not newsworthy on its face when a celebrity believes or says something incorrect about health.”
  — Carolyn Kylstra, N.Y. Times, 23 Aug 2019 [about anti-vaxxers]
  
  
• “In offering a supposedly scientific foundation for nativism, eugenics kicked off a national epidemic of confirmation bias.”
  — Shirley Blackwell, NY Review of Books, 26 September 2019
  
  
• “One of the world's really important divides lies between nations that react well to accidents and nations that do not.”
  — William Langeweische, The Atlantic, November 2001
  
  
• “[T]he moral case for intervention is only as strong as the practicality of the mission itself. There is no moral case for doing something you’re not capable of doing.”
  — Dexter Filkins, New Yorker, 16 Sep 2019
  
  
• “[We] often confuse our feelings with reality itself: Something makes us feel bad, and so we say it is bad.”
  — Michael P. Lynch, N.Y. Times, 23 Sep 2019
  
  
• “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
  — F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted by Sheilah Graham, Beloved Infidel, 1958
  
  
• “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero...Anything I did should be praised.”
  — Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, 26 Sep 2019
  
  
• “[T]he famous New Yorker cartoon — ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ — has been exposed as naive. Snowden wants us to understand that, unless you employ three-layer encryption, they even know your breed.”
  — Jonathan Lethem, NY Review of Books, 24 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[W]e can’t function as a society unless we have norms of how to behave. You can’t pass enough laws to take care of every human interaction.”
  — Jerry Springer, MSNBC talking with Stephanie Ruhle, 1 Nov 2019
  
  
• “[I]n America, a sociopath will beat a socialist seven days a week and twice on Sunday.”
  — Steve Schmidt, quoted in New York Magazine, 26 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[A] middle-aged white male wearing a tie and saying anything with some conviction will be believed by at least 55 percent of people, especially if they already want to believe it.”
  — Bill Oakley, Washington Post, 14 Nov 2019
  
  
• “[Neville] Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home, and read Mein Kampf.”
  — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers, 2019
  
  
• “Doubts are not the enemy of belief, they are its companion.”
  — Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers, 2019
  
  
• “He told me what he thought about language, instincts, race, inheritance, and a few allied subjects, and I discovered that the most boring thing in the world is to listen to someone talk to you about your specialty.”
  — Margaret Mead, quoted in Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air, 2019 [An example of how a thing, viz. mansplaining, can exist before its name.]
  
  
• “Cultures are cunning tailors. They cut garments from convenience and then work hard to reshape individuals to fit them.”
  — Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air, 2019
  
  
• “[N.Y. Times’ uncritical quoting] was emblematic of the credulous stenography ...that is so prevalent on its front pages.”
  — Dan Froomkin, Salon, 17 Dec 2019
  
  
• “Why is austerity in a depressed economy a bad idea? Because an economy is not like a household, whose income and spending are separate things. In the economy as a whole, my spending is your income and your spending is my income. What happens if everyone tries to cut spending at the same time...? Everyone’s income falls.”
  — Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times, 30 Dec 2019
  
  
• “People may see hypocrisy and cynicism all around them, but...they believe their own views and actions...are righteous and principled.”
  — John F. Harris, Politico, 9 Jan 2020
  
  
• “Like common law, the moral imagination works by precedent and example. We are all equipped with an inherited archive of historical events that serves as the background for everything that occurs.”
  — Peter E. Gordon, NY Review of Books, 7 Jan 2020
  
  
• “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point — that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”
  — Thomas Babington Macaulay, find citation
  
  
• “[T]he evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction.”
  — Joel Spolsky, blog, 11 Nov 2002
  
  
• “Manage the unavoidable so that you can avoid the unmanageable.”
  — Tom Friedman, N.Y. Times, 2020-03-31 [re coronavirus, climate change]
  
  
• “The troll simply has a couple of strategic advantages that liberals don’t have: Shamelessness and amorality.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-04-29 [re coronavirus, climate change]
  
  
• “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people...We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
  — John Ehrlichman, quoted by Dan Baum, Harper's, 2016 April
  
  
• “[I]t frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.”
  — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
  
  
• “The most courageous thing that [Tucker] Carlson has ever done was to wear a bow tie on the air.”
  — Max Boot, N.Y. Times, 2020-07-13
  
  
• “Trolling liberals...has replaced pious posturing as the lingua franca of American conservatives.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-08-11
  
  
• “White conservatives get to claim self-defense, no matter how clearly they instigate violence, because they view the rest of us as inherently threatening.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-01
  
  
• “[U]nskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported...The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman...Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion...All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
  — Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998
  
  
• “...I do think that people’s intentions matter and that we should take them into account. If a census worker says there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood, stating it as a fact, that is different from Donald Trump saying it at a rally.”
  — Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 2020-10-30
  
  
• “[P]eople really don’t want you to try to fit in. They’d much rather fill you in.”
  — Tom Wolfe, interviewed by Chet Flippo, Rolling Stone, 1980-08-21
  
  
• “Cats always look at you like you asked them to pick you up from the airport.”
  — Jaime Primak, Twitter, 2020-12-07
  
  
• “Statistics are human beings with tears dried off.”
  — Paul Slovic, quoted by William Wan in N.Y. Times, 2020-12-21
  
  
• “[A]longside near-miraculous advances in science come near-unbelievable examples of human irrationality.”
  — Max Boot, N.Y. Times, 2020-12-22
  
  
• “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
  — Research this one
  
  
• “Post-truth is pre-fascism...When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.”
  — Timothy Snyder, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved...It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and...the cover-up.”
  — Timothy Snyder, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “A joint statement [Sen. Ted] Cruz issued...nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.”
  — Timothy Snyder, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[E]vil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms.”
  — Andrew Gauthier, quoted by Ben Smith, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[I]t’s not clear to what extent [right-wingers] actually believe that this election was rigged, as opposed to being enraged that this time the usual vote-rigging didn’t work.”
  — Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-11
  
  
• “Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath...[T]he nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression....[W]e will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children.”
  — Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1970
  
  
• “Members of white mobs do not have to mask their faces...Being part of a white mob has rarely been a crime...A white mob views itself as an extension of the law, not a repudiation of it.”
  — Victor Luckerson, The New Yorker, 2021-01-15
  
  
• “Violence has become the central act through which the far right understands political agency...”
  — Suzanne Schneider, Washington Post, 2021-01-15
  
  
• “I came to realize what extremism researchers and cult experts have long known to be true: You cannot just destroy a community and expect it to disappear when it is load bearing.”
  — Stuart A. Thompson, N.Y. Times, 2021-01-27
  
  
• “[Marco Rubio is] worried that the impeachment trial is a pesky distraction from what Republicans really want to focus on — which is obstructing Biden’s agenda.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 2021-02-11
  
  
• “Cruz understood that calling someone a “snowflake” is an insult...Then he named his own dog Snowflake. That’s like a normal person naming his dog Ted Cruz.”
  — Joel Stein, Washington Post, 2021-02-20
  
  
• “As an adult, it's much easier to spot the zipper on the monster's costume.”
  — S.J. Stover, Salon, 2021-02-28
  
  
• “The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares. The good man must...become the monster...in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”
  — Jack Kerwick, American Greatness, 2021-04-12 [He’s serious, not characterizing the views of others.]
  
  
• “[Lenin] launched his campaign against workers, against entire factories, who, according to his words, ‘clung to the tradition of capitalism,’ that is, they refused to work while starving, which always irritated and exasperated Lenin.”
  — Gregory Petrovitch Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, 1940, quoting Lenin “On the Character of Our Press”, 1918
  
  
• “Bureaucracy...is ascribed by Lenin not to the system but to a wicked will...‘We need a terroristic purge: trials held on the spot and shooting as an unreserved measure.’”
  — Gregory Petrovitch Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, 1940, quoting Lenin “On the Food Tax”, 1921
  
  
• “The basic feature of the prevailing Party course is the faith in the omnipotence of violence — even in regard to its own Party.”
  — Boris Souvarine, Stalin, Aperçu Historique du Bolshevisme, 1935, cited by Gregory Petrovitch Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, 1940
  
  
• “The ideology of Bolshevism now has as its basic principle: to each according to the services he renders to the state...”
  — Gregory Petrovitch Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, 1940
  
  
• “34% of [Republicans] believe that ‘disloyalty should be punished’ (a phrase that sounds better in the original German.)”
  — Heather Digby Parton, Salon, 2021-05-17
  
  
• “Lindell’s most telling delusion is the blithe salesman’s confidence that sooner or later we’ll all agree with him.”
  — Andrew O'Hehir, Salon, 2021-06-06
  
  
• “[S]pite is the main motivating force behind the contemporary American right.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2021-07-09
  
  
• “I serve with people who...don’t have the confidence to believe that they could get a job other than Congress, so they do anything they can to stay in their jobs...”
  — Eric Swalwell, quoted by Matt Rozsa, Salon, 2021-07-18
  
  
• “The attack on the straw man of CRT is of a piece with what we might call the purification of American history in the name of God’s history.”
  — Frederick Clarkson, quoted by Paul Rosenberg, Salon, 2021-07-24
  
  
• “[T]errorism is at least as much about male violence as ideology...angry young men are attracted to extremist ideas that appear to ‘justify’ their grievances.”
  — Joan Smith, The Guardian, 2021-08-06
  
  
• “[H]ighly educated professionals...are convinced all problems can be addressed if only we find someone wise enough to see around all the corners.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, N.Y. Times, 2021-08-29
  
  
• “To the extent that McCarthy has control over what comes out of his mouth, what he voiced was a lie.”
  — Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 2021-09-07
  
  
• “We not only talk about morality in terms of paying debts, but we also think about morality that way. Concepts like retribution, restitution, revenge, and justice are typially understood in such financial terms.”
  — George Lakoff, Moral Politics, 1996
  
  
• “The self-righteous person’s superfluity of moral credit is the basis for his discourse.”
  — George Lakoff, Moral Politics, 1996
  
  
• “In the Strict Father model of the family, people become self-reliant by using their self-discipline to pursue their self-interest.”
  — George Lakoff, Moral Politics, 1996
  
  
• “Conservatives believe that all of the major ills of our present society come from a failure to abide by their moral system.”
  — George Lakoff, Moral Politics, 1996
  
  
• “[The] power of disinformation comes not from fooling people, but rather from...creating a social permission to become ever worse versions of themselves...huge numbers of Americans are excited to embrace fascism and are just looking for an excuse — even if it’s based on a bunch of obvious lies — to go there.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2021-10-04
  
  
• “The Hildebrandts...are a nuclear family chiefly in the fissile sense.”
  — Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 2021-10-04
  
  
• “Government is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage [Evangelicals’] enemies on behalf of White Christianity...There is nothing Democrats can ‘give’ them (e.g., jobs, cheaper health care) to satisfy their need for White Christian ascendency.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 2021-11-9
  
  
• “Having the leader of their party incite a fascist riot created a stark and undeniable choice for Republicans, both voters and politicians: You’re either a fascist or a Democrat — and the vast majority of them think there’s nothing worse than being a Democrat.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon 2022-01-06
  
  
• “Revisionists wish to build an international order of their liking. Revanchists...do not dream of changing the world but of changing places with the victors of the last war.”
  — Ivan Krastev, N.Y. Times 2022-02-27
  
  
• “[I]f you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.”
  — Matt Gaetz, Firebrand [more like dickhead], 2021
  
  
• “Rich people complaining is how shit always gets done.”
  — Trevor Noah, The Daily Show, 2022-03-10
  
  
• “[I]f all communication is just manipulation...only dictatorship can be a legitimate form of power.”
  — Tim Snyder, interview, The N.Y. Times , 2022-03-16
  
  
• “[P]eople who respond to others aggressively and act impetuously are at acute risk of suicide, because they respond to themselves with impulsive belligerence, too.”
  — Andrew Solomon, New Yorker, 2022-04-11
  
  
• “Advertising requires attention, and attention and engagement are higher when they are the result of negative emotions such as anger or fear...[trolls] are a loud minority with a disproportionate impact thanks to...algorithmic amplification of anger, because anger generates more engagement.”
  — Maite Taboata, Policy Options, 2021-10-08
  
  
• “Nowhere are Russians treated as badly as in Russia.”
  — Nastya Mez, q. by Uliana Pavlova in Politico, 2022-04-07
  
  
• “Republicans...are primarily preoccupied with getting rid of what’s disgusting to them.”
  — Dr. Justin Frank, Salon, 2022-04-09
  
  
• “[To Putin] the world is just a cake to be sliced by those who happen to hold a knife.”
  — Kristina Sabaliauskaitė, Salon, 2022-04-09
  
  

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