"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me."
     - Ambrose Bierce 

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
     - Gore Vidal

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. 
 The opposite of a profound truth may well be another 
 profound truth."
                    - Niels Bohr

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."
     - H. H. Munro (Saki)

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
     - Martin Fraquhar Tupper

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - 
I'll waste no time reading it."
     - Moses Hadas 

"You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, 
because you might not get there."
     - Yogi Berra

"I am not young enough to know everything."
     - Oscar Wilde

"The object of war is not to die for your country 
but to make the other bastard die for his."
     - General George Patton 

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."
     - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"I have an existential map; 
  it has 'you are here' written all over it."
     - Steven Wright

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."
     - Igor Stravinsky

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try 
the one I've never tried before."
     - Mae West

"The gods too are fond of a joke."
     - Aristotle 

"Attention to health is life greatest hindrance."
     - Plato 

"Plato was a bore."
     - Friedrich Nietzsche 

"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."
     - Leo Tolstoy 

"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."
     - Ernest Hemingway 

"Hemingway was a jerk."
     - Harold Robbins

"Nothing is wrong with California that a 
 rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure."
     - Ross MacDonald 

"Men have become the tools of their tools."
     - Henry David Thoreau 

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
     - Mark Twain 

"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other
alternatives."
     - Abba Eban 

"Criticism is prejudice made plausible."
     - H. L. Mencken 

"It is better to be quotable than to be honest."
     - Tom Stoppard

"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."
     - Karl Wallenda

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."
     - Sun Tzu

"Hell is paved with good Samaritans."
     - William M. Holden

"The longer I live the more I see that I am 
never wrong about anything, and that all the 
pains that I have so humbly taken to verify 
my notions have only wasted my time."
  	   - George Bernard Shaw

"I think it would be a good idea.
     - Mahatma Ghandi, when asked 
      what he thought of Western civilization

"The difference between fiction and reality? 
   Fiction has to make sense. "
    			 - Tom Clancy

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment 
that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going. 
		-Tennessee Williams

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch 
of hand on hand, or mouth on mouth. --		
		-Tennessee Williams

a thousand lips			                 a thousand tongues
a thousand throats			         a thousand lungs
a thousand ways to make it true I want to do terrible things to you
                                           -?

"It's a bit too early in the morning for stardom, now isn't it?"
                         - Donna, Elastica

“Ambition bites the nails of success.
			-Bono

“Maybe we'll take all the mean people and use them
 to fill up the ozone hole.
				-Sark

"Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific.
 It is IN the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is 
an island that is right here." 
		- Vice President Dan Quayle

“Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw
through the leather straps."  
			- Emo Phillips

"The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music 
the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it.
 The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the
 Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.
			-John Muir

Caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments 
of unaging intellect.
			-William Butler Yeats

It is from the blues that all that may be called American
 music derives its most distinctive characteristic.
		-James Weldon Johnson

I must study politics and war that my sons may have 
liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons 
ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography,
natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce,
and agriculture, in order to giver their children a right to
study painting, poetry, music...
				-John Adams

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, 
to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
			-William Congreve

Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, 
but you are the music while the music lasts.
		-Thomas Eliot

I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed 
to be untrue.
	- Richard Nixon, discussing Watergate in 1978

Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a 
very important part of your life.
		- Brooke Shields

I love California. I grew up in Phoenix.
	-Vice-President Dan Quayle

Without censorship, things can get terribly 
confused in the public mind.
	- General William Westmoreland

The brain is a mass of cranial nerve tissue,
most of it in mint condition.  
			-Robert Half

Their fundamental design flaws are completely
hidden by their superficial design flaws. 
		 -  Douglas Adams

"The rule which forbids ending a sentence 
 with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up
 with which I will not put."      
		   -Winston Churchill

"Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction
  has to make sense!"
			-Liralin Li

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same 
 God who endowed us with sense, reason and 
 intellect has intended us to forgo their use."   
		- Galileo Galilei

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
                              		     - John Lennon

The more I study religions the more I am convinced I become 
that man never worshipped anything but himself.
			- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate
 it as at least a misdemeanour.
                                     -Lazarus Long

"Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity.
 Never attribute to conspiracy what is obviously coincidence. 
And never attribute to persecution what is obviously a bad case 
of paranoia.
					-?

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone 
directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval 
of civilization. 
                                  	- Georges Clemenceau

"The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general 
 reading public against books not too rugged for grown men
 and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising 
 its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the
 house to roast the pig...The of this enactment is to reduce the 
 adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children." 
	- US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter


I keep my ideals,    
        because in spite of everything,     
                  I still believe that people         
                            are really good at heart.
                                         -Anne Frank

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle:  The location of all objects 
cannot be known simultaneously.
Corollary: If a lost thing is found, something else will disappear.

I tried to contain myself, but I got out.
                                  -?

Nobody can be exactly like me.  Even I have trouble doing it. 
					-T.Bankhead

Exposure to dioxin is usually not disabling but may be fatal.
  			-  Dow Chemical Company report

"This life has been a test. Had this been an actual life, 
you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do."
					- Angela Chase

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 
					- Lord Acton

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, 
for words are slippery and thought is viscous. 
			- Henry B. Adams

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
 I want to achieve it through not dying. 
			- Woody Allen


Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture 
available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. 
The most terrifying thing is what people do want. 
				- Clive Barnes

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, 
but unlike charity, it should end there. 
			-Clare Boothe Luce

The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; 
and the pessimist fears this is true. 
			- James B. Cabell

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, 
but most times he will pick himself up and carry on. 
			- Winston Churchill

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; 
the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. 
				- Winston Churchill

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others. 
			- Winston Churchill

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. 
			- Confucius

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. 
				- Will Durant

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough. 
				- Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. 
					- Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. 
			- Albert Einstein

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.
It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. 
					- Albert Einstein

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. 
					- T. S. Eliot

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's 
oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search 
for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
			- John Kenneth Galbraith

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought. 
			- Graham Greene

There is nothing permanent except change. 
			- Heraclitus

It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, 
you are an exceptionally good liar. 
			- Jerome K. Jerome

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and 
yet keep both ears to the ground. 
			-H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. 
				- H. L. Mencken

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste
of the American public. 
			- H. L. Mencken

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals. 
				- H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine 
that age brings wisdom. 
			- H. L. Mencken

A good listener is not only popular everywhere,
but after a while he gets to know something.
		- Wilson Mizner

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us 
that someone might be looking. 
			- H. L. Mencken

"When it comes to paradigms, shifts happen." 
                    - Alain Rossman

Have you come here for forgiveness,
Have you come to raise the dead,
Have you come here to play Jesus,
To the lepers in your head,
	  -U2, One


You miss too much these days if you stop to think.
	-U2, “Until The End Of The World.”

Hello, I saw you, I know you, I knew you
I think I can remember your name...name
Hello I'm sorry, I lost myself
I think I thought you were someone else
	-REM, “Pop Song 89”

I sit at my table and wage war on myself
It seems like it's all...it's all for nothing
I know the barricades, and
I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I used them well
	-REM, “World Leader Pretend”

I proclaim that claims are left unstated
	-REM, “World Leader Pretend”

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,
Blowing down the backroads headin' south.
		-Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”

A man breathes deep into a saxophone
through the walls we hear the city groan
		-U2, “Bullet the Blue Sky”

I'll settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need
	-REM, “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream”

At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend
I don't care if you're not here with me
'Cause it's so much easier to handle
All my problems if I'm too far out to sea
But something better happen soon
Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back
	-REM, “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville”

An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
	-Bob Dylan, “STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH
                                 THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN”

We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.
		-Bob Dylan, “Tangled up in Blue.”

Where the earth shows its bones of wind-broken stone 
And the sea and the sky are one 
I'm caught out of time, my blood sings with wine 
And I'm running naked in the sun 
There's God in the trees, I'm weak in the knees 
And the sky is a painful blue 
I'd like to look around, but
Honey, all I see is you.
			-Stan Rogers, “45 Years”

"Step outside, like a ghost into a fog where no one notices the contrast 
of white on white.  And in between the moon and you, angels get a 
better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right." 
				- Counting Crows

“..if you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air, 
you're bound  to hit someone guilty.”
				-U2

"every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief.  All kill their 
inspiration and then sing about their grief."
				-U2

There ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk.
                        -Tom Waits

We're Just 2 lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year
Running over the same old ground, having found the same old fear
wish you were here
                       -Pink Floyd

"withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy"
 		- R.E.M.
 
 "what we want and what we need has been confused"
 		- R.E.M.

"Did you make mankind after we made you?"
		- XTC (Dear God)

"Do I have to tell the story of 1000 rainy days since we first met?
Its a big enough umbrella, but its always me who ends up getting wet."
			-Sting

I believe in example, I believe my throat hurts,
Example is a fault and fault lines change
    	    -R.E.M.

     Where the vulture glides descending  
     On an asphalt highway bending 
     through libraries and museums, galaxies and stars 
     Down the windy halls of friendship 
     To the rose clipped by the bullwhip 
     The motel of lost companions  
     Waits with heated pool and bar.
		-Neil Young “Trasher”

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary 
than the spectre of Communism.
		-A. J. P. Taylor

It is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
		-Napoleon Bonaparte

It is not funny that anything else should fall down;  
only that a man should fall down … Why do we laugh?
 Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the fall 
of man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can
 be dignified.
		-G. K. Chesterton

Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly 
inconsistent with one's own opinion.
		-Ambrose Bierce

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal 
point of addiction is what is called damnation.
		-W. H. Auden

The only thing one can do with good advice is
 to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
		-Oscar Wilde

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom 
you asked the way. I pointed ahead — ahead of 
myself as well as you.  
(Bishop of Chelsea, “Getting Married”)
	-George Bernard Shaw


I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what 
many ignorant men are sure of.
	-Clarence Darrow

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him 
who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who
asserts and thinks that he has found.
	-Miguel de Unamuno
 
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, 
they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, 
they do not refer to reality.
	-Albert Einstein

Beauty for some provides escape.
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
	-Aldous Huxley

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the 
importance of the country in which the office is held.
	-Aldous Huxley

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
	-Alexander Pope

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a 
riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
	-Sir Winston Churchill

The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
	-Desmond Morris

We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied 
that we know enough to get by. Every question we a
nswer leads on to another question. This has become 
the greatest survival trick of our species.
	-Desmond Morris

And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
	-T. S. Eliot

One of the difficulties in the language is that all our words
 from loose using have lost their edge.
	-Ernest Hemingway

I'm always acutely conscious of the Force Behind — 
(Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, 
whatever one calls it — Mystery certainly) — and of the 
eternal tragedy of man in his glorious, self-destructive 
struggle to make the force express him instead of 
being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its 
expression.
	-Eugene O'Neill

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's 
vocabulary needs consent fertilisation or it will die.
	-Evelyn Waugh

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord 
would do if he knew the facts of the case.
	-Finley Peter Dunne

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you 
have forgotten your aim.
	-George Santayana

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, 
for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand 
freedom of speech as a compensation.
	-Sören Kierkegaard

Smell The Flowers wile you can..'
	-David Wojnarowicz"

"Faith" means not wanting to know what is true.
	-Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a
 problem which he has to solve.
	-Erich Fromm

Half the world is composed of people who have 
something to say and can't, and the other half
 who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
	-Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
	-attributed to Robert Frost

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.
	-Christopher Fry


I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
	-T. S. Eliot

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of 
orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. 
There never was anything so perilous or so exciting 
as orthodoxy.
	-G. K. Chesterton

Dogmatism does not mean the absence of thought, 
but the end of thought.
	-G. K. Chesterton

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not 
true that a divine being fell, then we can only say 
that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
	-G. K. Chesterton

If God hadn't rested on Sunday, he might 
have had time to finish off the world.
	-Gabriel García Márquez

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories,
the police are prowling through the cities, the lies
 are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth 
is still going round the sun.
	-George Orwell

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at 
an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
	-George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.
	-George Santayana

The working of great institutions is mainly the result 
of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, 
carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual 
fraction is thought.
	-George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
	-George Santayana

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul 
controlled by geography.
	-George Santayana

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read 
a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible,
 to speak a few reasonable words.
	-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Know thyself"? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
	-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
	-Gore Vidal

It is quiet here and restful and the air is delicious. 
There are gardens everywhere, nightingales sing in 
the gardens and police spies lie in the bushes.
	-Maxim Gorky

I find television very educational. Every time someone 
switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
	-Groucho Marx

Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank
 superior to that attained by Christ.
	-H. L. Mencken

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us 
that someone may be looking.
	-H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in
 the occurrence of the improbable.
	-H. L. Mencken 

Morality is the theory that every human act must be
 either right or wrong and that ninety-nine percent of
 them are wrong.
	-H. L. Mencken

Self-respect — the secure feeling that no one, as yet, 
is suspicious.
	-H. L. Mencken

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat
 overestimated his ability.
	-Oscar Wilde

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases
 to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
		-Oscar Wilde

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