Quotation Collection, Post your favorite quotes here

[Ayeshalan]

"We're a good people, but we're not as good as we think we are. Being an American means you have the gene of arrogance. We don't understand that not everyone wants to be like us."
-- John Pincetich, an 88-year-old veteran of the U.S. Navy and the Peace Corps (reported in the Oregonian, 9/12/2004)

"I'm really tired of people telling me that because I'm a Christian, I have to be a conservative. Jesus wasn't conservative -- that's why they killed him!"
-- caller on Air America Radio, 5/14/2004

"I wish heroes didn't exist. Whenever we need a hero, it's because there's a problem that needs to be solved; it's because two groups of people, or two countries, are hurting one another, so a hero is needed to save us. If everyone were at peace, if everyone were happy, why would we need heroes? The world is better off without heroes."
--Jet Li

"If hackers were people who hotwired cars to steal them, these people are just punks slashing tires with shiny knives they didn't even make."
-- a LiveJournal admin describing the source of malicious traffic on the site

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell

"Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. They're more easily handled than dumb mistakes."
-- William Wister Haines

"Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people."
-- Barbara Harrison

"That woman I was talking to ... she sure took a beating from her husband! How come she's in jail?"
"Pretty good reason. She stabbed him."
"Oh."
-- Police recorder and sergeant, on "Nightwatch" radio program (1955)

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
-Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

"Is there anything more dangerous than an ideologue who doesn't know he's wrong?"
--Seymour Hersh

"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the
shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood,
more vengeance, more desolation."
--William Tecumseh Sherman

"If you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you're given a front-row seat."
-- George Carlin

"Sure we'll have fascism in America, but it'll come disguised as 100 percent Americanism."
--Huey P. Long

"The future will not belong to those who sit on the sidelines. The future will not belong to the cynics. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
--Paul Wellstone

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire, philosopher
( 1694-1778 )

[The Geneva Convention] basically states you gotta treat all war prisoners with a shred of humanitarian dignity or you can't call yourself a fair and civilized Christian superpower, and if you don't follow those basic rules you are, in essence, no different from the terrorists and the dictators you claim to abhor and you are bombing the crap out of.
-- Mark Morford

[Ayeshalan]

"I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives...arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet."
-- Abigail Adams, writing to her husband John in April 1776


"For the truth there is no deadline."
-- Heywood Campbell Broun, founder of the Newspaper Guild

[chronicler]

*you could start with quotes of me in my signature*

"Fight fire with fire only in the absence of water." -The Chronicler

"When the impossible has been eliminated, that which remains must be the truth." -Sherlocke Holmes

*more will come later*

[DarkKarma0]

"Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you."
--William Blake

[chronicler]

I could fill a tome with quotes, but I am too tired. (I have started on the monumental task of reading Bartlett's Familiar Quotations from cover to cover.)

[CyberIstari]

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
-- Mark Twain

[Seian]

Mark Twain's great for some crotchety quotes.

[chronicler]

yes he is, so is Lao-Tzu.

"In the government of the sage, He keeps their hearts vacuous, Fills their bellies, Weakens their ambitions, And strengthens their bones, He always causes his people to be without knowledge [cunning] or desire, And the crafty to be afraid to act" -Lao-Tzu

[CyberIstari]

Unsure, when what was bright turns dark
and life, it seems, has lost its way,
we question what we once believed
and fear that doubt has come to stay.
We sense the worm that knaws within
has withered willpower, weakened bones,
and wonder wheter all that's left
is stumbling blocks or stepping stones.

- Wild Goose of Iona

[chronicler]

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. -Edgar Allen Poe

[DarkKarma0]

Here are two radically different sources for ya:

Our greatest glory consists not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.
--Vincent Van Gogh


Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup,
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle,
You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow or it can crash!
Be water, my friend.

-- Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

[chronicler]

light a man a fire, and you warm him for a day... but light a man ON fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.

[DarkKarma0]

And presumably anyone who's become water are on firefighting duty....

Okay, a few more quotations to redeem myself and stay on-topic:

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
-- Lenny Bruce

You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
--Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince

[chronicler]

karma's sog reminded me of this...

"Gentlemen what we do is treason, we must all hang together or we will most assuredly all hang separately." -Ben Franklin

"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door."

"I was, I thought I was a lemon." -Ford Prefect (Douglas Adams)

[Ayeshalan]

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."
--Alexander Graham Bell