"In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive."

-- Bill Bernbach

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."

 

-- Tom Robbins

"Herr, lehre uns Bedenken, dass wir alle einmal sterben müssen, auf das wir im Leben klug werden."

"Lord, teach us to understand we all have to die sometime, that we become wiser in our lives." 

-- Psalm 90:12

"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."  

-- Edith Wharton

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

 

-- H.L. Mencken

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.” 

-- Tom Waits

"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." 

-- Lily Tomlin

"Death is very likely the best invention of life. All pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important." 

 

-- Steve Jobs

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” 

  -- Noam Chomsky

"The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum."  

-- Havelock Ellis

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death."

 

-- Joan D. Vinge

“What is the New Testament? A handbook for those who are to be sacrificed.”

--Soren Kierkegaard

"Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I want to use whatever gifts I have for practical purposes, not waste them on things which have no life, or which have to be kept alive by artificial means."

-- Kurt Weill

"You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter."

-- Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol, The 30 Harshest Artist-on-Artist Insults

"May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the paralysis and poverty of a child, and sing and dance in the compassion of God who is Father, Son and Spirit.

Amen." 

-- Brennan Manning

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

-- Carl Sagan

“If you're going through hell, keep going.”

-- Winston Churchill

"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all."

-- Marine General James Mattis, to Iraqi tribal leaders

"Heavenly father, we thank you tonight for all your blessings.

You said ‘in all things give thanks.’ So we want to thank you tonight for these mighty machines that you’ve brought before us. Thank you for the Dodges and the Toyotas. Thank you for the Fords and most of all thank you for Roush and Yates partnering to give us the power we see before us tonight. Thank you for GM Performance Technology and the R07 engines. Thank you for Sonoco racing fuel and Goodyear tires that bring performance and power to the track. Lord I want to thank you for my smokin’ hot wife tonight, Lisa. My two children, Eli and Emma, or as we like to call them — the little E’s. Lord I pray you’ll bless the drivers as usual tonight. May they put on a performance worthy of this great track in Jesus’ name.

Boogity boogity boogity. Amen."

-- Pastor Joe Nelms, Family Baptist Church

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

-- H. L. Mencken, US editor (1880 - 1956)

"The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half-built towers -- the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish.  For thousands of people still ignore Christ's warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so.  The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called 'nominal Christianity'."

--John R.W. Stott

50 Quotes of Albert Einstein

1. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
2.  “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
3. “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
4. “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
5. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
6. “The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
7. “A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”
8. “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
9. “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
10. “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
11. “Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”
12. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
13. “Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.”
14. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
15. “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
16. “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.”
17. “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
18. “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
19. “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
20. “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
21. “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
22. “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
23. “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
24. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
25. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
26. “Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”
27. “Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.”
28. “If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”
29. “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
30. “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
31. “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
32. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
33. “In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.”
34. “The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.”
35. “Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.”
36. “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”
37. “No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”
38. “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
39. “Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.”
40. “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
41. “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
42. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
43. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
44. “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
45. “One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
46. “…one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
47. “He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
48. “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
49. “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Compiled by: Kevin Harris 1995

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life-except death itself was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

- David E. Davis, Jr., RIP

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” 

- Leo Tolstoy

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."

- John Ruskin

"Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen."

- Bob Edwards

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

-- Oscar Wilde