I am the Supreme Being, you know. I'm not entirely dim.
-God (in Time Bandits)
I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us.
--Samuel Beckett
However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.
--David Berlinski
The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
--Errol Morris
No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.
--David Berlinski
Where do we go to escape the modern? Modern is no good, we know. Big mistake. Huge mistake-- ugliness and cruelty and horror and squalor and publicity. Modernism wanted to change the world, and it achieved nothing.
--Alex Melamid
Modernism is finished! Call the cops!
--Tom Wolfe
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool.
--Richard Feynman
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem it was intended to solve.
--Karl Popper
How can one avoid despondency if one thinks of the anomalous Zeeman effect?
--Wolfgang Pauli [of a problem in physics]
There's no idea that's so good that you can't ruin it with a few well-placed idiots.
--Scott Adams
When God created the stock market, he told it,
"Now listen. You can't fool all the people all the time-- but I want you to try."
--Andrew Tobias
I will tell you a secret: dealmaking beats working. Dealmaking is exciting and fun, and working is grubby.
--Management theorist Peter Drucker
Only the little people pay taxes.
--Leona Helmsley
Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the esssence of the evolutionary spirit... Greed-- mark my words-- will save the U.S.A.
--Gordon Gekko (Wall Street)
Good is better than evil because it's nicer.
--Mammy Yokum
The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects.
--Alexis de Tocqueville
Do you think the Party changed its mind about holding power because it wanted to? They hear our voices even if they're not very loud. After Romania, their hearing improved.
--a Soviet Georgian woman
It was as though Kafka's Joseph K. had been retried and acquitted.
--Amos Elon, on the "Prague Autumn"
Marxism has almost invariably brought about the vengeful destruction of productive power, not the thoughtful redistribution of it.
--Jonathon Kwitny
Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.
--Mario Vargas Llosa
An old friend, still convinced that art is a firearm, was so good as to warn us that it is almost treachery to make films about love in a world oppressed by injustice and poverty.
I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.
--Gabriel García Márquez
No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.
--Frank Zappa
Heaven would be a place where bullshit existed only on television. (Hallelujah! We's halfway there!)
--Frank Zappa
I realize I am generalizing here, but, as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.
--Dave Barry
It is no disgrace for a person to fall, but to lie there and grunt is.
--Matt Groening
Being a good embalmer is a thankless job.
--Matt Groening
There you go, mate. Keep as cool as you can. Face piles of trials with smiles. It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave. And keep on thinking free.
--The Moody Blues
Oh oh children of the land
Love is still the answer Take my hand
The vision fades
A voice I hear:
"Listen to the Madman!"
But still I fear
And still I dare not
Laugh at the Madman.
--Queen
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
--R.E.M.
I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob
--John Lennon
Olha que coisa
mais linda
mais cheia de graça
Si le bon Dieu a mis les anglais sur une île, c'est
qu'il avait ses raisons.
I like to think hell has a special circle set apart for Americans who are Anglophiles-- although they call it a 'roundabout'.
One can always make new friends, but a good butler is not easy to find.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. It follows that all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
What is this that roareth thus?
é ela a menina> que vem
e que passa num doçe
balanço
a caminho do mar.
[The usual English equivalent is:
Tall and thin and young and lovely,
the girl from Ipanema goes walking
and as she passes each one she passes says, "Aaah!"
More literally:
Look, such a lovely thing, so full of grace:
It's her, the girl who comes
balanced so sweetly, on her way to the sea.]
--Vinicius de Moraes and Tom Jobim
[If God put the English on an island, it's because he had his reasons.]
--an old Frenchwoman living near the Chunnel
--Speaker on WBEZ
--Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
Progress is not made by early risers, it is made by lazy people looking for an easier way of doing something.
--Robert Heinlein (probably)
--George Bernard Shaw
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!
--A.D. Godley
