You're an actor, are you?
Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and
incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first
reducing it to something personal, material, sensational -- and probably
sexual!
- George Herman, A Company of Wayward Saints
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I do not take drugs. I am drugs.
- Salvador Dali
When I was a child, my mother said to me, "If you become a
soldier you'll be a general. If you become a
monk you'll end up as the pope." Instead I became a painter and
wound up as Picasso.
-Pablo Picasso
One of the symptoms of an
approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly
important.
- Bertrand Russell
I am not young enough to know
everything.
- Oscar Wilde
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I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to
achieve immortality through not dying.
-Woody Allen
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
It is better to be feared than
loved, if you cannot be both.
- Niccolo Machiavelli
There is one thing in the
world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- Oscar Wilde
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Perfection is achieved, not when
there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de
St. Exupery
I don't want life to imitate
art. I want life to be art.
- Carrie Fisher
What is an artist? For every
thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine
doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.
- Tom Stoppard
True ornament is not a matter
of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a
person, a building, or a park. At its best, it is an emphasis of structure, a
realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
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- P.J. O'Rourke
You can't get good chinese
takeout in China and cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to
know about communism.
-P.J. O’Rourke
How did an allegedly free people
spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every
orifice of the body politic?
-P.J. O'Rourke
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
-Joseph Stalin
Listen, strange women, lyin' in ponds, distributin' swords, is no
basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate
from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony! You can’t expect to
wield supreme executive power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at
you. Why, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened
bink had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
- “Dennis,” Monty Python And The Holy Grail
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When nothing seems to help, I go and look
at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a
hundred times without as much as a crack
showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I
know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
-Jacob Riis
To make an apple pie from scratch, you
must first create the universe.
-Carl Sagan
If you took away
everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except
a lot of people getting rained on.
-Tom
Stoppard
Who was the first guy that looked at a
cow and said, "I think that I'll drink whatever comes out of those
things when I squeeze them?
-Bill Watterson (from "Calvin And
Hobbes")
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To love is
to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not
loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is
to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but
suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to
suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
- Woody Allen
There is no
sincerer love than the love of food.
- George Bernard
Shaw
My advice
to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll
become a philosopher.
-Socrates
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When you
have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Sir Winston Churchill
The
ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory nor defeat, but in the perfection of
the character of its participants.
- Master Gichin Funakoshi
When two
tigers fight, one is certain to be maimed, and one to die.
- Master Funakoshi
Unarmed
hand-to-hand fighting does not change through the ages; only the name changes,
and it has only one rule: do it first, do it fast, do it dirtiest.
- Robert A. Heinlein
If you
don't realize you can kill someone with a bokken, I don't want you using one in
MY dojo...
- Frederick Lovret
- Fredrick Lovret
Sometimes
I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.
- Paul Rodriguez
Do not
get into a fight if you can possibly avoid it, but never hit soft. Don't ever
hit a man unless you must, but if you hit him, put him to sleep.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Sometime they'll
give a war and nobody will come.
-Carl Sandburg
Anger clouds the mind, Raphael.
-Splinter
Victory
goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
-Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower
In
Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci, and the
renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of
democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
-“Harry Lime” (Orson Welles), The
Third Man.
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A myth is a religion in which no one any
longer believes.
-James Feibleman
I do not
feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei
Maybe this world is another planet's
hell.
-Aldous Huxley
I would
have made a good Pope.
- Richard M. Nixon
I contend that we are both atheists. I
just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand
why you dismiss all the other possible
gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
Hell is other people.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
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-Niels Bohr
The statistics
on sanity are that one out of every four Americans are suffering from some form
of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are OK, then it's
you.
-Rita Mae Brown
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
-Akiro Kurosawa
Insanity is the exception in individuals.
In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Sanity is a cozy lie.
-Susan Sontag
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Before you criticize someone, you should
walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile
away from them, and you have their shoes.
-Dave Barry
No drug,
not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for
the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test
them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
- P. J. O'Rourke
I don't
know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do
it again.
- Bart Simpson
The problem
with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're
going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
- Elizabeth Taylor
The only
way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Oscar Wilde
It is
absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or
tedious.
- Oscar Wilde
America is
the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in
between.
- Oscar Wilde
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I love deadlines. I like the whooshing
sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams
An editor can be fired…not so a writer.
He cannot be fired. He might be rejected, he might fail, he might starve, he
might be forced to keep body and soul together by taking some menial (i.e.,
non-writing) employment, he might be ignored by the critics and denounced by
the public—but he was a writer, a failed writer, an unsuccessful writer, a
starving writer, a writer. No editor could change that fact.
- Isaac Asimov, Murder at the ABA
The
original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be
imitated by none.
- Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
Immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal.
- T. S. Eliot
- Nora Joyce to her husband James
You have to have something vicious in you
to be a creative writer...God save me from being 'nice'.
- D.H. Lawrence
I can write
better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody
who can write better.
- A. J. Liebling
Anyone may
be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.
- Moliere
A poem is
never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery
There is no
such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly
written. That is all.
- Oscar Wilde
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Teaching is the process by which the
notes of the professor become the notes of the student without
passing through the mind of either.
-Woody Allen
It pays to be
obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
-Isaac
Asimov
No one
can earn a million dollars honestly.
- William Jennings Bryan
You can get more with a kind word and a
gun than you can with a kind word alone.
-Al Capone
Sometimes I think we're alone in the
universe. Sometimes I think we're not. In both cases the thought is
equally shocking.
-Arthur C. Clarke
Like the Germans, the Dutch fall into two
quite distinct physical types: the small, corpulent, red-faced Edams, and the
thinner, paler, larger Goudas.
-Alan Coren
He would
make a lovely corpse.
- Charles Dickens
Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away.
-Philip K. Dick
I don't know why
it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we
would lie there and rest for a while.
-Max Eastman
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a
very persistent one.
-Albert Einstein
Delicious
in a way that only truly awful, stupefyingly unhealthy food can be. Delicious
in a way that vegetables can only dream of being.
-Ben Elton
Human
salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Television:
a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.
-Ernie Kovacs
A cynic is a man
who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-H.L. Mencken
Lord, grant
that I may always desire more than I accomplish.
- Michelangelo
Three
o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
I can do
you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric
without the love and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive but I
can't do you love and rhetoric without blood. Blood is compulsory -- they're
all blood you see.
- Tom Stoppard, Ros and Guil are Dead
Too many
pieces of music finish too long after the end.
- Igor Stravinsky
Anything
that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
– Voltaire
Though LSD and some kindred alkaloids
have had an amazingly bad press, there seems to be no doubt of their immense
and growing value.
- William G. Wilson, founder of Alcoholics
Anonymous
Give me the
luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
In any man
who dies, there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight...
No people die but worlds die in them.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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Social tact is making your company feel
at home, even though you wish they were.
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the
small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in
your path and you will find you have
crossed the mountain.
The fastest draw is when the sword never
leaves the scabbard,
The strongest way to block, is never to
provoke a blow,
And the cleanest cut is the one withheld.
Deja Fu:
The feeling that somehow, somewhere, you've been kicked in the head like this
before.
A closed
mouth gathers no feet.
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