Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them.

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.

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

Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them.

Judgment is forced upon us by experience.

To hear complaints is tiresome to the miserable and the happy.

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

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.

Try and forget our cares and sickness, and contribute, as we can to the happiness of each other.

The true sound and strong mind is the one that can embrace equally great and small things.

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.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

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

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

No one will persist long in helping someone who will not help themselves.

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.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

To have gold is to be in fear, and to want it to be sorrow.

When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by others, let them reflect how little they have contributed to the happiness of others.

When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.

If what happens does not make us richer, we must welcome it if it makes us wiser.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, ''I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.

Oh, great. This is going to be like shooting baskets with Magic Johnson watching. [On watching Independence Day with President Clinton]

He that undervalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them.

He that never thinks can never be wise.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.

I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.

Kennedy cooked the soup that Johnson had to eat.

My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the presidents. I don't think Kennedy should have done it. I don't think Johnson should have done it, and I don't think we should have done it.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom.

The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it is the shades of privacy.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many foulder in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterward propagate it.

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, 'I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.'

Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.