Quotations

F to J

William Feather

• Most of us expect too much from others and not enough from ourselves.

Mark L. Feldman

• Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Answer: five. Why? Because there's a difference between deciding and doing.

Richard Feynman

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest to fool.

W.C. Fields

• If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again. Then give up. There's no use in being a damned fool about it.

Firesign Theatre

• There’s a seeker born every minute.

Malcolm Forbes

• You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.

Henry Ford

• Paying attention to simple little things that most men ignore makes a few men rich.

Martin Foss

• The grotesque will always appear and take hold of those ages which are under the strain of disaster, feeling the sinister and chaotic aspects of life, but advanced enough to appease the mind by laughter. [In Symbol and Metaphor
  in Human Experience (1949)]

H.W. Fowler

• The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it. [in Modern English Usage (1926)]

Anatole France

• The law in its majesty prohibits rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.

Benjamin Franklin

• Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
• Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither.

Sigmund Freud

• Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
• The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

Robert Frost

• Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self confidence.

Galileo Galilei

• 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.

Judy Garland

• We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

Willard Gibbs

• The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.

Jean Giraudoux

• The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Dale Gislason

• You can't lead by pushing.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his existence is irretrievably under the control of destiny.

Paul Goodman

• I don’t want to come to grips with power; I want to jujitsu it.

Wavy Gravy

• Death was Patrick Henry’s second choice.

Alan Gottlieb

• It’s the stupidity, stupid.

C.W. Grafton

• I know it is true, I made it up myself.

Graham Greene

• When we are not sure, we are alive.

G.I. Gurdjieff

• Believe nothing, not even yourself. [in Views from the Real World (talks from 1917-1933, published in 1973)]
• That which is easy is bad for your inner life. [in Voices in the Dark, wartime meetings (compiled by Patterson)]

H.H. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

• I believe that the destructive nature of society that now threatens the existence of the entire human world has much to do with human intelligence. The way to overcome all human suffering—that also is through human intelligence.
• My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

J.B.S. Haldane

• The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.
  This is often paraphrased by substituting the word "stranger" for "queerer," understandable as the original sense of the word "queer" has been eclipsed by the sense of "homosexual" since Haldane said that.

Butch Hancock

• Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.

Bill Handley

• A thing is the reification of an operational principle.

Robert Harper [Congressman, South Carolina, 1765-1825]

• Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.

Sir John Harrington

• Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason. [in Epigrams (1618)]

Stephen Hawking

• I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Jane Heap

• Love your enemies—they may tell you the truth.

Robert Heinlein

• All my enemies are self-appointed.

Don Herold

• There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of being in a hospital, in jail, in debt, or in bad repute.

Ed Howe

• Some men are alive only because it is against the law to kill them.

Hubert Humphrey

• The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously.

Aldous Huxley

• The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
• Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Thomas Huxley

• Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense.
• The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

William James

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
• Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention, but it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
• Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their being.  They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into the habit of using and moving only his little finger.  Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Anthony Jay

• The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.

Thomas Jefferson

• Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
• I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
• I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
• I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
• It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
• I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
• I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
• Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
• No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
• The care of every man's soul belongs to himself.  But what if he neglect the care of it?  Well, what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate?  Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick?  God himself will not save men against their wills.
• The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.
• The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
• The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and of tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jesus of Nazareth

• The world is a bridge. Pass over it, but build no house upon it. [Saying attributed to Jesus carved upon the wall of a Muslim temple in India]

Samuel Johnson

• Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour.
• Nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. 
• Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
• Sir, I have given you an argument. I am not obliged to provide you with an understanding.
• The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
• There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy the first notice of a prey.
• We often look with indifference on the successive parts of something that, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion.

Franklin P. Jones

• Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Erica Jong

• Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

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