Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

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

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

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?

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)

We are most alive when we're in love.

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!

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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

There are times when fear is good It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain.

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

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values-- the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

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.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity . . . any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about dong it right, or better.

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.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

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

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

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 founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

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

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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]

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

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.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

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.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

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.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

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.