This list was compiled as a last resort to sanity after a plethora of discussions with numerous people on various contemporary (and not) issues that, in their majority, lead absolutely nowhere. Then I realised that you need to be either a Wise man or Franklin to be taken seriously while you try to convey even the simplest of concepts:
"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that
Benjamin Franklin said it first"
True, like all of the other wise words below which obviously are not my ideas and, to my surprise, were all quoted first by B. Franklin.
Enjoy.
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A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
-- Bernie Greenberg.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- G. B. Shaw
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist"
"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a
sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an
exam.
-- S. C. Johnson
"A witty saying proves nothing."
-- Voltaire
Acquaintance, n.:
A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well
enough to lend to.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income.
-- Samuel Butler
"... all the modern inconveniences ..."
-- Mark Twain
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism
to decadence without touching civilization.
-- John O'Hara
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.
-- A. E. Housman
Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
-- Tom Leher
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
-- Aesop
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Baruch's Observation:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
-- Mark Twain
"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence"
-- ‘Time Bandits’
Bore, n.:
A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Boy, n.:
A noise with dirt on it.
Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
committee -- that will do them in.
Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone
Ranger have handled this?"
Brain, n.:
The apparatus with which we think that we think.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
Children are natural mimic who act like their parents despite every
effort to teach them good manners.
Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for. Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
-- Ogden Nash
Churchill's Commentary on Man:
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the
time he will pick himself up and continue on.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
-- Mark Twain
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Commitment, n.:
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs.
The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is
good for dandruff.
-- Peter de Vries
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking
Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
-- H. L. Mencken
Conway's Law:
In any organization there will always be one person who knows
what is going on.
This person must be fired.
Coronation, n.:
The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and
visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite
bomb.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-- Senator Soaper
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- G. B. Shaw
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by
Jackasses.
-- H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people
are right more than half of the time.
-- E. B. White
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow
Fairy Tale, n.:
A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
Faith, n:
That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be
untrue.
For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
-- R. Clopton
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
-- Olivier
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem:
Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem
meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's
Theorem. To wit:
1. Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
2. Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break
even.
3. Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the
game.
God is Dead
-- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is Dead
-- God
Nietzsche is God
-- The Dead
God is real, unless declared integer.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the
elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying
other things.
-- Pablo Picasso
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board
-- Mark Twain
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
-- Kronecker
God must love the Common Man; He made so many of them.
Gold, n.:
A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It
is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who
immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold
hasn't done anything to them.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
Got Mole problems?
Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23
Grabel's Law:
2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY (#21) -- July 30, 1917
On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl. He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000" Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.
H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.