Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn John Cotton Dana

If you were in a room with Kadaffi, Saddam Hussien, and John Sununu, and you only had two bullets, what would you do. Shoot John Sununu twice.

John Johnson Now this is something the other tour guides won't tell you. In this particular cell-block, Machine Gun Kelly had what we call in the prison system, a bitch. And one night in a jealous rage Kelly took a make-shift knife or shiv, and cut out the bitch's eyes. And as if this wasn't enough retribution for Kelly, the next day he and four other inmates took turns pissing into the bitch's ocular cavities. (short pause) This way to the cafeteria

Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on. I mean, look at Napoleon --but we went right on. Look at Harpo Marx --the world went around, it didn't stop for a second. It's sad but true. John Kennedy, right?

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

I feel like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built. (On construction of reviewing stands for inauguration of his successor John F Kennedy)

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

John: "Mabye you should stop taking the paint off that and take a break" Brian: "The big purple cow standing on the neon clown told me I can't!

It was a great ride up here. We're really happy to see Sergei and John.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. [I John]

Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.

John: "What day was it, Grandma?" Grandma Alice: "Oh you know, it was the other day before yesterday after tommorow.

Johnson's First Law: When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the most inconvenient possible time.

WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE Oh, dear, where can the matter be When it's converted to energy? There is a slight loss of parity. Johnny's so long at the fair.

This is my commandment, that ye love one another. [Jesus, In John 15:12]

Look my story has been a really happy one except for that comment from John Brogden, so let's not dwell on it.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. -- John Ruskin

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Trying to call my friend John after he got home from military school: "Is John there??" "Who the hell is this!!! You think this is funny?? Don't ever call back, you little punk!!!" Apparently john's old number was now Papa John's Pizza. Oops.

All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity -- their links with their dead and the unborn.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

-- Exclusive dedication to necessitious chores without interludes of hedonistic diversion renders John a hebetudinous fellow.

After [my father had] seen me in five or six things, he said, ''Son, your mother and I really enjoyed your recent film, and I must say that you're a lot like John Wayne.'' And I said, ''How so?'' And he said, ''Well, you're exactly the same in all your roles.'' Now, as a modern American actor, that's not what you want to hear. But for a guy who watched John Wayne movies and grew up in Iowa, it's a sterling compliment.

The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.

Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists. Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization.

We know that we have passed from death into life, because we love... [1 John 3:14]

We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block.

Let him who desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction-Samuel Johnson

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent. [Jesus -- John 17:3]

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

A few years back I was more a candidate for skid row bum than an Emmy. If I hadn't stopped [drinking], I'd be playing handball with John Belushi right now.

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

What's nice about my dating life is that I don't have to leave my house. All I have to do is read the paper: I'm marrying Richard Gere, dating Daniel Day-Lewis, parading around with John F. Kennedy, Jr., and even Robert De Niro was in there for a day.

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.

To John I owed great obligation; but John, unhappily, thought fit to publish it to all the nation: Sure John and I are more than quit.

People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

Publicity is the life of this culture. Without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.