this is why I always check the _____ instead

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

Stephen King

On Utopia

"I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth, the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process."
James Lileks

random quotes

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
Samuel Johnson

"Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms."
Alan Corenk

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work."
Richard Bach

"The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
Robert Frost

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
Carl Jung

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
Abba Eban

"Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies."
Dalton Camp

quote

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
Jane Wagner

May?

Round and round we go

"Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor."

Robert Frost

Two paths, etc etc.

Mmmmm... Picasso

"A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso."
A. P. Herbert

The Portable Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole was a bit of a gadfly and rather quotable.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon.

By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.

I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.

I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing. [e.g.]

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

etc. He also coined the word "Serendipitous." Is serendipity, as a difficult to translate single-word sociological observation, the English schadenfreude? I think so.

Quotes

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."
George Bernard Shaw

"Exercise relieves stress. Nothing relieves exercise"
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
Kilgore Trout

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."
Harry S. truman

"The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it."
Daniel Webster

"I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, 'I'd like some fries.' The girl at the counter said, 'Would you like some fries with that?'"
Jay Leno

"I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."
Steven Wright

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
Robert Benchley

"There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters."
Alice Thomas Ellis

"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of."
Ogden Nash

"A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats."
Anonymous

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."
Laurence J. Peter

"The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you."
Nancy Astor

"The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums."
Peter De Vries

Q's of the D

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't."
Robert Benchley

"Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke."
Lynda Barry

"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."
Henny Youngman

"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."
Lily Tomlin

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
Ralph Hodgson

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
Evelyn Waugh

"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
Edith Wharton

"A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?"
Don Marquis

"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?"
Ronnie Shakes

"Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted."
Hesketh Pearson

Good luck with that

It's really important to me not to be known as Ross when I'm 60.
David Schwimmer

Yeah, ask Spock how that worked out.

Quote of the Day

"The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away."
Fulton J. Sheen

And from the mental image of the day:

"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn."
Fulton J. Sheen

Now That's A Quote

"The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky"
Solomon Short

Also from Solomon:

"Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, 'The black cat is always the last one off the fence.' I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true."

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

He truly was a wise man, but the wisest? Also, perhaps I've friendly-fired* myself with that last quote of his (*alt, "self-inflicted rim-shot wound").

Quotes

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."
Voltaire

"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."
W. H. Auden

"He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes."
James Thurber

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Unknown

"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."
John Stewart Mill

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."
Edith Warton

"If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."
P. G. Wodehouse

"Oregano is the spice of life."
Henry J. Tillman

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."
William Hazlitt

"You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light."
Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Unquote Quote

The blog of unnecessary quotation marks.

Quotes

Is there life before death?
Graffiti

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.
Kin Hubbard

Red meat is NOT bad for you. Now blue-green meat, THAT'S bad for you!
Tommy Smothers

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Jeff Valdez

The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Tom Stoppard

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
Johann von Neumann

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.
Anonymous

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Dorothy L. Sayers

Quotes

"A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't."
Unknown

"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."
Robert Heinlein

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
Jean Kerr

"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."
Woody Allen

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."
Robert Frost

"A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time."
Alfred E. Wiggam

"On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away."
Tom Lehrer

"Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or because they didn't."
L. L. Henderson

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."
W. Somerset Maugham

The funniest thing I've read today

"Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people."
Robert Benchley

Quotes

"It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it."
Miguel de Cervantes

"Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens."
Nick Diamos

"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'."
Larry Hardimann

"Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters."
Margaret Halsey

"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!"
Tom Lehrer

"If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee."
Abraham Lincoln

"The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him."
Russell Baker

"Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address."
Lane Olinghouse

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
Granville Hicks

"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs."
Samuel Goldwyn

"A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits."
Woodrow Wilson

"There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them."
Emily Chartier

"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather."
Michael Pritchard

"No human thing is of serious importance."
Plato

"Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision."
Penn Jillette

"You can learn from anyone even your enemy."
Ovid
[-ed, especially your enemies]

"It is bad luck to be superstitious."
Andrew W. Mathis

"He talked with more claret than clarity."
Susan Ertz

"A waist is a terrible thing to mind."
Jane Caminos

"Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf."
Lewis Mumford

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."
Josh Billings

Quote of the Day

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."
Jascha Heifetz
Russian-American violinist (1901 - 1987)

Obvious point: I/You may be that person.

There is something similar I noticed about jerks too: If there is a jerk in the group of people you work with or who you know, when they leave they will soon be replaced by another jerk. There is a conservation of jerks. I think this is related to the X type of Y cartoons from Groening's Life in Hell cartoons.

Quotes

"The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood."
Logan Pearsall Smith

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
E. W. Dijkstra

"To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture."
Anatole France

"The superfluous, a very necessary thing."
Voltaire

[I like to think so.]

"A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not."
Henry Fielding

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
Warner Brothers, 1927.

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
Last words of Pancho Villa (1877?-1923)