quotes

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
           -- Arthur Honegger

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
           -- Tom Lehrer

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
           -- Claud Cockburn

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
           -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
           -- Wilson Mizner

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
           -- Franz Kafka

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
           -- Bertrand Russell
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
           -- John Kenneth Galbraith

All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
           -- Stanislaw J. Lec, "Unkempt Thoughts"

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
           -- Thomas Hardy
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
           -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I improve on misquotation.
           -- Cary Grant

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
           -- Bill Watterson, cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes"

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
           -- George Bernard Shaw
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
           -- Ronald Reagan

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.
           -- Emile Chartier

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
           -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Foreword

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
           -- Jules Renard
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
           -- Mark Twain, Notebooks (1935)

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
           -- Bill Hoest

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
           -- Josh Billings

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.
           -- Elbert Hubbard