"You can't fix stupid."
Ron White

“When you meet the president, you ask yourself, 'How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be governor much less president?'”
Henry Kissinger

"I accept reality and dare not question it."
Walt Whitman during the Civil War

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
T.S. Eliot

****************

Ernest Hemingway

        on writing . . .

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me."

        . . . and on life . . .

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."


Winston Churchill  

"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is."  

"This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read."

"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
 
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

"I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future."
 
"If you are going through hell, keep going."

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."

"Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room."

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
 
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is."

**************

Friedrich Nietzshe


“Belief means not wanting to know what is true”

“Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness”

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”

“No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.”

“You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.”

“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment”
************

George Orwell

"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."

"Good writing is like a windowpane."

"Happiness can exist only in acceptance."

"Serious sport is war minus the shooting."

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

"What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?"

"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."
~Robert Pirsig (1948-)  

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
~Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)  

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
~Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)  

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." ~Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)  

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
~Voltaire (1694-1778)  

"Facts are the enemy of truth."
~Don Quixote - "Man of La Mancha"  

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
~Steven Wright  

"I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it."
~Groucho Marx (1895-1977)  

"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
~Carl Sagan (1934-1996)  

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
~Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)  

"Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency."
~Lewis Perelman  

"Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."
~Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)  

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
~Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
~Henry David Thoreau

"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth." ~Ludwig Börne

"You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough." 
~William Blake, Proverbs of Hell  

"The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter."
~G.C. Lichtenberg  

"No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head."
~Terry Josephson  

"The obstacle is the path." 
~Zen Proverb  

"What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?"
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Child Harold's Pilgrimage  

"Seeking is not always the way to find."
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827  

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
~Author Unknown  

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning." 
~Aleister Crowley, Book of Lies  

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." 
~Dr Seuss  

"The scars you can't see are the hardest to heal."
~Astrid Alauda

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." 
~Niels Bohr

Eggs cannot be unscrambled. 
~American Proverb

"No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place." 
~Zen Proverb

"The obstacle is the path." 
~Zen Proverb  

"The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."
~Robert M. Pirsig


Albert Einstein

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."

"I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil."

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

"Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds."


Isaac Asimov

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

"People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."