It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out.

I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth--that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally--but I didn't want to upset him.

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.

The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.

Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.

Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.

I can't stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like, "Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me?" or "Do you have that $50 you borrowed?" Man, quit being so cheap!

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed shrink is our friend.

I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I'd like to have one of those little beds with my name on it.

It's true that every time you hear a bell, an angel gets its wings. But what they don't tell you is that every time you hear a mouse trap snap, an Angel gets set on fire.

I guess I kinda lost control, because in the middle of the play I ran up and lit the evil puppet villain on fire. No, I didn't. Just kidding. I just said that to help illustrate one of the human emotions, which is freaking out. Another emotion is greed, as when you kill someone for money, or something like that. Another emotion is generosity, as when you pay someone double what he paid for his stupid puppet

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave Man, I guess I'm a coward.

Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.

War will cease when men refuse to fight.

Mata Hari

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

Donald Harington

(from Some Other Place. The Right Place) The dew at night is the weeping of the stars.

Sir John Harington

Books give not wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harper's Index, October 1989

Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250

Sydney Harris

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case.

Paul Harvey

In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.

If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con', what is the opposite of progress?

Hasidic sayings

Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience.

Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him, and then choose that way with all his strength.

Stephen Hawking

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

(from Nature 1975, 257, 362) God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(from The House of the Seven Gables) What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

S. I. Hayakawa

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

William Hazlitt

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 might of been.

We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.

(from Dr Channing in American Literature) The least pain in our little finger gives more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

Hebrew Proverbs

Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.

Do not confine your children to your learning, for they were born in a different time.

Heinrich Heine

When words leave off, music begins.

Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.

God will forgive me. It's his profession.

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all.

Human misery is too great for men to do without faith.

(from Das Meer hat seine Perlen, Stanza 1)
The sea has its pearls,
The heaven its stars, --
But my heart, my heart,
My heart has its love.

(from Almansor)
Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.

Robert A. Heinlein

(on censorship...) The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

(Jubal in Stranger in a Strange Land) "Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

(Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love) Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Heisenberg

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

... we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of searching.

Lillian Hellman

People change and forget to tell each other.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Felicia Hemans

There is nothing, in all this cold and hollow world, no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart.

W. E. Henley, from England, My England

What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?

Patrick Henry

(from a speech, March 23, 1775) As for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Heraclitus

There is nothing permanent except change.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Volker Herminghaus-Shirai

A computer with an "intel inside" sticker is about as attractive as a woman with an "HIV positive" tattoo.

Don Herold

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

Herodotus

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.

Hermann Hesse

There is no reality except the one contained within us.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

Gilbert Highet

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice and just as the touch on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

Cullen Hightower

We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex---but Congress can.

Alfred Hitchcock

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat. Cut it.

The Hitopadesa

Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge, virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by degrees, a pot is filled.

Adolf Hitler

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

James P. Hogan

(Zambendorf in Code of the Lifemaker) Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors -- they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.

Alan Holbrook

Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.

Josiah Holland

The heart is wiser than the intellect.

John Andrew Holmes

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting for centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

Rev. John Hughes Holmes

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it unfriendly. It is simply indifferent.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging; it is the skin of living thought and changes from day to day as does the air around us.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it contracts.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving; To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it--but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets the notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.

Horace

Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger.

Nil desporandum. (Never Despair)

Carpe Diem. (Seize the day)

We are but dust and shadow.

It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.

A. E. Housman

... And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

When I Was One-and-Twenty, from A Shropshire Lad
When I was one-and-twnty
I heard a wise man say,
'Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one and twenty
I heard him say again,
'The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

Stephen Howarth, from The Knights Templar

The Crusaders rested for five months in Antioch, gathering their strength; there was still a long fight ahead. Between Antioch and Jerusalem many more battles were fought, and the Crusaders were often close to starving; once at least they had to resort to cannibalism, eating their dead enemies. A pilgrim named Richard, in the army of Robert of Flanders, described how Peter the Hermit encouraged this, saying 'Are there not corpses of Turks in plenty? Cooked and salted they will be good to eat.' Apparently they were, and tasted rather like bacon.

Nathaniel Howe

he way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones.

Professor Hrusa (CMU)

You can leave if you want -- I won't take offense, even if intended.

Professor Hrusa: Does that mean that Calculus with Sets & Mappings is Calculus S&M?
Jon Bennet: Obviously, for mathechists!

Elbert Hubbard

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Die: To stop sinning suddenly.

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

P. K. Hubbard

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

Langston Hughes

(from The Black Man Speaks)
I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.

Victor Hugo

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when; whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that one is loved; loved for oneself, or better yet, loved despite oneself.

Leigh Hunt

Jenny Kissed Me
Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

Fannie Hurst

A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far.

Robert Hutchins

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Sir Julian Huxley

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

Thomas Huxley

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.