| Words of Witticism and Wisdom |
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- There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920
- There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. -- Pablo Picasso
- There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it. -- Mary Wilson Little
- There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one. -- Laurence J. Peter
- There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income. -- Edmund Wilson
- There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn't tell you about it? -- Kin Hubbard
- These days an income is something you can't live without--or within. -- Tom Wilson, Ziggy (comic)
- To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent. -- Robert Copeland
- Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. -- Thomas H. Huxley
- Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
- We're actors - we're the opposite of people. -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
- What we call 'Progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. -- Havelock Ellis
- When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. -- William Wrigley Jr.
- When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. -- Marquis de la Grange
- Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. -- Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003
- Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. -- unknown, Popular Mechanics, March 1949
- Why do writers write? Because it isn't there. -- Thomas Berger
- Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. -- Elvis Costello, Interview in Musician magazine, October 1983
- You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -- Eric Hoffer
- You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. -- Jack London
- You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty. -- Cecil Baxter
- You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. -- Will Rogers, New York Times Aug. 31 1924
- You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play. -- Warren Beatty
- [Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. -- Al Capp
- A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats. -- Anonymous
- Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks. -- Eric Sevareid
- I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves. -- Bruce Grocott
- I was coming home from kindergarten--well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves. -- Ellen DeGeneres
- No man ever listened himself out of a job. -- Calvin Coolidge
- People want economy and they will pay any price to get it. -- Lee Iacocca
- A book of quotations . . . can never be complete. -- Robert M. Hamilton
- A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to. -- Granville Hicks
- A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members. -- David Coblitz
- A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. -- Sir Barnett Cocks
- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. -- John Gaule
- A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. -- Fred Allen
- A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. -- John le Carre
- A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool. -- Joseph Roux
- A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. -- Robert Frost, (attributed)
- A lawyer starts life giving $500 worth of law for $5 and ends giving $5 worth for $500. -- Benjamin H. Brewster
- A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation. -- Donald Trump
- A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats. -- Anonymous
- A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck. -- Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Keep the Faith, Baby! , 1967
- A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. -- George Bernard Shaw, Parents and Children (1914) Children's Happiness
- A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -- Mark Ardis
- A stitch in time would have confused Einstein. -- Unknown
- A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. -- Thomas Mann
- About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends. -- Herbert Hoover
- Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties. -- Doug Larson
- Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. -- Sir Ralph Richardson, quoted in New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1946
- Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion. -- Kate Reid
- Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin. -- Stanislaw J. Lec, Unkempt Thoughts
- After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed. -- De La Lastra's Law
- All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. -- Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
- All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- Ernest Rutherford, in J. B. Birks Rutherford at Manchester (1962)
- All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. -- Mark Twain, Letter to Mrs Foote, Dec. 2, 1887
- WorkAn economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. -- Laurence J. Peter
- An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. -- Niels Bohr
- An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out. -- Will Rogers
- An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. -- Friedrich Engels
- An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions. -- Robert A. Humphrey
- Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. -- Frank Zappa
- At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote. -- Emo Phillips
- At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years. -- Arthur C. Clarke, 1983
- Behind every great fortune there is a crime. -- Honore de Balzac
- Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel. -- Oscar Levant
- But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
- By the time we've made it, we've had it. -- Malcolm Forbes
- Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question. -- Albert Camus
- Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency. -- Raymond Chandler
- Cocaine is God's way of saying that you're making too much money. -- Robin Williams
- Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. -- E. W. Dijkstra
- Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. -- Andy Rooney
- Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. -- Howard Scott
- Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks. -- Eric Sevareid
- Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. -- George Burns
- Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
- Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. -- Elbert Hubbard
- Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. -- G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)
- Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. -- Hector Berlioz
- Every crowd has a silver lining. -- Phineas Taylor Barnum
- Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -- Thomas H. Huxley
- Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion. -- Robertson Davies
- Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears. -- Robert W. Sarnoff
- For every person who wants to teach there are approximately thirty people who don't want to learn--much. -- W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, And Now All This (1932) introduction
- For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. -- Clifton Fadiman
- Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling
- Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling
- Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. -- Barry LePatner
- Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. -- John Wanamaker
- Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. -- Aldous Huxley, Vedanta for the Western World, 1945
- Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? -- Edgar Bergen, (Charlie McCarthy)
- He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes. -- H. E. Martz
- Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation. -- Walter Winchell
- Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog. -- Doug Larson
- Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
- I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -- Isaac Asimov
- I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism. -- Howard Dietz
- I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying. -- Woody Allen
- I enjoy being a highly overpaid actor. -- Roger Moore
- I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution. -- Wernher von Braun
- I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting. -- Ronald Reagan
- I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. -- Galileo Galilei
- I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. -- Thomas A. Edison, (attributed)
- I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite. -- Craig Newmark, Keynote Speech, SXSW 2006
- I love acting. It is so much more real than life. -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. -- Peter De Vries
- I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known. -- Walt Disney
- I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself. -- Marlene Dietrich
- I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. -- Albert Einstein
- I only know two pieces; one is 'Clair de Lune' and the other one isn't. -- Victor Borge
- I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. -- Orson Welles
- I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place. -- Steven Wright
- I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on. -- Beryl Pfizer
- Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. -- Floyd Dell
- If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? -- Laurence J. Peter
- If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. -- George Bernard Shaw
- If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith.
- If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door. -- Paul Beatty
- If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything. -- Bill Lyon
- If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine
- If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -- Abraham Maslow
- If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking. -- Lyndon B. Johnson
- If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score? -- Vince Lombardi
- If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much. -- Donald H. Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
- If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. -- Vince Lombardi
- If you believe everything you read, better not read. -- Japanese Proverb
- If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong. -- Mo Udall
- If you watch a game, it's fun. If you play at it, it's recreation. If you work at it, it's golf. -- Bob Hope
- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. -- Henry J. Tillman
- I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. -- Thomas Jefferson, (attributed)
- I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. -- Carl Sandburg, Incidentals (1907)
- I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. -- e e cummings
- I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago. -- Will Rogers
- In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear. -- John C. Dvorak
- In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from. -- Peter Drucker
- In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known. -- Thomas Pickering
- In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language , 1946
- In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
- In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you. -- Frank Wilczek
- Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein, (attributed)
- It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. -- Konrad Lorenz
- It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. -- Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
- It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. -- Aeschylus
- It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. -- Oscar Wilde, The Model Millionaire, 1912
- It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair
- It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. -- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
- It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours. -- Harry S Truman, in Observer, April 13, 1958
- It's kind of fun to do the impossible. -- Walt Disney
- It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem. -- Malcolm Forbes
- Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all. -- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
- Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -- Alan Turing
- Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose. -- Andy Rooney
- Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. -- Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
- Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. -- Peter Drucker
- Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel. -- William Hazlitt
- Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields. -- Peter Borden
- Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. -- Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993
- My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. -- P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983
- No one can earn a million dollars honestly. -- William Jennings Bryan
- No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar. -- Donald Foster
- Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content. -- Louis L'Amour
- Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. -- Sidney J. Harris
- Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. -- A. H. Weiler
- One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. -- Sir William Osler, Aphorisms from his Bedside Teachings (1961) p. 105
- Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -- Thomas A. Edison
- Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. -- Isaac Asimov
- People will buy anything that is one to a customer. -- Sinclair Lewis
- Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing. -- Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary
- Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday. -- Don Marquis
- Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
- Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long. -- Ogden Nash
- Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. -- Samuel Johnson, from Boswell's Life of Johnson
- Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. -- Immanuel Kant
- Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. -- W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
- Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. -- W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
- Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable. -- Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park, Prehistoric Ice Man, 1999
- The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys. -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876
- The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. -- John Maynard Keynes
- The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. -- Robert Frost
- The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any. -- Katharine Whitehorn
- The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- The graveyards are full of indispensable men. -- Charles de Gaulle
- The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. -- Thomas H. Huxley
- The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell
- The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television. -- Unknown
- The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. -- Arthur Koestler
- The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...' -- Isaac Asimov
- The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes. -- Dave Barry, The Taming of the Screw
- The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. -- Russell Baker
- The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work. -- Harry Golden
- The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. -- James Baldwin
- The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. -- Heinrich Heine
- The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. -- Edwin Schlossberg
- The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time. -- Willem de Kooning
- The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. -- Bill Cosby
- There are 350 varieties of shark, not counting loan and pool. -- L. M. Boyd
- So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. -- Peter Drucker
