Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

Attitudes to museums have changed. If it had Marilyn Monroe's knickers or Laurence Olivier's jockstrap they would flock to it.

I was so happy,-Eric Miller

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

Your fortune stateth: You will inherit millions of dollars.

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

If you've done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round it off with dinner at Milliway's, the restaurant at the end of the universe?

Other nations have tried to check... the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

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

I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.

Man, there are a million fine girls in the world, but not all of them bring you lasagna at work. Most of them just cheat on you.

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?

I'm going to eat like a pig from now on. Who am I trying to impress? The nasty, ugly girls I wouldn't touch in a million years?;"Joel Wachowski, at lunch.

Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race, as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times.

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)

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.

There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.

The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.

I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not. If I could, be... a great athlete and make a million a year, be a wit, a born -- vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist ... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life. Be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more of less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failure are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

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!

Money doesn't make you happy. I now have 50 million but I was just as happy when I had 48 million.

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

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- ''I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.''

People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

We saved a million bucks. My owner [Ross Perot Jr.] was real happy about that.

The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.

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

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

They came out in the millions to show their dogged support for the woman the dictatorship claimed it had defeated in the election.

I would rather have a million friends than a million dollars.

We have achieved the most amazing things, a few million people opening up half a continent. But we have not yet found a Canadian soul except in time of war. (On lack of national identity)

When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

Originality is the one thing unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be preserved. The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the Armada, it wears out the rock. In like manner, whatever the struggle of individuals, the great cause will gather strength.

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.

Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession. And still we hear, If only this nation had a soul, or, Let us change the way we trade, or, Let us be proud of our region.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?;"Steven Wright

Over one mind and over ones body the individual is sovereign.