Quotes! I like quotes. Here’s a bunch of them. These have all, at one point or another, given me that little rush in the shoulders for their sharpness, cuteness, brutality, truth or temptation (lies can be pretty too).
I’ve pared a bunch of these down for flow and brevity, marking edited versions with an asterisk after the attribution. I’m comfortable doing this because
it lets me leave out clumsy punctuation: [pronoun clarifiers], …ellipses and such,
not everyone who happens across a poignant thought has the rhetorical skill to fully capture it,
none of these sentiments originate with the named author so the least we can do is remember the words in their most essential form. Oral history in text or something like that. And
half the time quotes are recorded inaccurately or misattributed anyway, so who cares.
Anyways! To wit, in no particular order.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
Non sum qualis eram. (trans: I am not what I was.)
Horace
The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
Walt Kelly
For my friends: everything. For my enemies: the law.
Oscar Benavides, Field Marshal and President of Peru
The ultimate ethical decision we make is who we choose to be in our circle, thus choosing the judges of our character, and thus what we aspire to.
Russ Roberts by paraphrase from an unidentified source (see why I’m not overly concerned about original wording?)*
Beware unearned wisdom.
Carl Jung
Don’t just do something; sit there.
Sylvia Boorstein
I loved working on industrial gear from Japan because if it wasn’t right, it didn’t get fudged: it got fixed.
AvE
Every complex problem has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
HL Mencken*
Nature is Satan’s church.
Lars Von Trier
I am a damned smarter man than Grant. I know more about military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does. I know more about supply, administration, and everything else than he does. I'll tell you where he beats me, though, and where he beats the world: he doesn't give a damn about what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell. He uses such information as he has according to his best judgment, issues his orders, and does his level best to carry them out without much reference to what is going on about him. And so far? Experience seems to have fully justified him.
William Tecumseh Sherman, on Ulysses S Grant*
What gets mismeasured get mismanaged.
Rory Sutherland
The solution to a problem is never inside the problem.
Jocko Willink*
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
Samuel Johnson
When they burned the Library of Alexandria, the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes.
Frog K, in response to Guitar Center not using the picture of a guitar as the “G” in their logo
We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.
Archilochus
If Hell is where I’m headed then I’m making good time.
Travis McCready
Politics is the art of taking money from the few and votes from the many under the pretense of protecting one from the other.
Matthew Quay
There are always more scapegoats than goats.
?
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
Howard Aiken
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.
The Bankster
The shortcut that’s sure to work, every time: Take the long way. Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency.
Seth Godin
If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan properly.
Colonel David Hackworth
Anyone who will lie for you can lie to you.
Penn Jillette*
You are not thinking, you are just being logical.
Niels Bohr*
To never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in perpetual dislocation. You never worry about where you are, and so you never find out.
Nick Carr, The Glass Cage*
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.
J Krishnamurti*
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Abraham Maslow*
These are places that are not worth caring about.
James Kunstler, in reference to American suburban sprawl (though the sentiment extends)
I feel an earnest and humble desire, and shall till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness.
Justin McElroy
As soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, we abandon all attempts of understanding it.
Berthold Brecht
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
AJ Liebling
What about your 10-year plan is keeping you from completing it in the next 6 months?
Peter Thiel*
I have so many haters I could fill a mausoleum with them.
Brace Belden
No life worthy of the name consists of anything more than the continual series of struggles to develop one's character through the medium of whatever one has chosen as a career.
Juan Belmonte
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Second stanza of The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.
Abraham Lincoln, 1862
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.
Abraham Lincoln, 1865
It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.
Samuel Johnson
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
Jon Ronson
It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
Jean de la Fontaine
To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope.
Herbert Hoover
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. We may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Bill Bryson*
We have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering sauropods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive but our absence.
HE Strickland, referring to the dodo
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate how little we know about what we seek to design.
Friedrich Hayek*
Begin at the beginning; go on till you come to the end; then stop.
Lewis Carroll
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. And you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Karl Rove
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is to make yourself do the thing you ought to do, when you ought to do it, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson you confront and—however early your training begins—the last lesson you understand.
Thomas Huxley*
And the rest are my personal attempts at short-form poignancy (surely plagiarized in some unknown capacity from someone else, as these things are):
It is neither above nor beneath you to create beautiful things.
Don’t waste time explaining why a thing that works doesn’t.
The fulcrum between amateur and professional work rests on whether you fool yourself or everyone else.
Why do you work so hard to impress people you hate?
Future you doesn't want to do it either.
Inconvenience is the uncle of invention.