"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

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the Word is made flesh."

-- Leonard Cohen

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."

-Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

--John Kenneth Galbraith

"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."

-- Meister Eckhart

"I'm a part of Willie Nelson's world and I love it, but at the same time, I'm part of the Grateful Dead's world. One night I might be playing twin fiddles at the Broken Spoke and the next night I'll be down at Antone's playing blues. In that way Texas is a paradise, because all that music is here."

-- Doug Sahm, 1975

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."

-- P. J. O'Rourke

"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret."

-- Laurence J. Peter

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

--Horace Mann, founder of Antioch College

"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

--Rod Serling

"Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

-- E.F. Schumacher

"I've been looking for that particular son of a bitch for seven years. I could have been a doctor, or an architect."

--Vivian Stanshall (Bad Blood)

"The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity. As a fresh start, she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy. The clergy should live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945),
Letters and Papers from Prison

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

-- George Orwell

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

-- Edith Sitwell

"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity."

-- Frank Leahy

"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., advertising writer and magazine publisher, recounting a nearly fatal auto racing accident at age 25 that left him disfigured.

"We have to repent of our blindness, our lukewarmness, and our disobedience, and turn back to the central truth of Christ as Lord and Saviour; an ethical system will not save us here, nor a timid sentimentalism, nor an excited emotional return, nor a dilettante mysticism.

We have to find that deep contrition which is the condition of His abiding.

Repentance is not a mere feeling of sorrow or contrition for an act of wrongdoing. The regret I feel when I act impatiently or speak crossly is not repentance... Repentance is contrition for what we are in our fundamental beings, that we are wrong in our deepest roots because our internal government is by Self and not by God.

And it is an activity of the whole person. Unless I will to be different, the mind will not follow.

True repentance brings an urge to be different, because of the sense of the incessant movement of what I am, forming, forming, forming what I shall be in the years to come."

-- Florence Allshorn (1887-1950)

"An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness."

"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive."

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."

"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."

"Life is just one damned thing after another."

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."

"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."

--Elbert Hubbard, (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915)

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

--John Adams

‎"For some it was crazy, for others it was stupid, and others a day of courage and bravery. For me, it was a day to enjoy being on the bike."

--Carlos Sastre, on his ultimately futile attack on Stage 17 of the Tour de France

"Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Venetian Epigrams, as translated by Jerome Rothenberg

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

-- Barry Goldwater

"Whatever be our conception of the universe we must, it is obvious, start somehow; we must begin with something; and the something with which we begin, from the very fact that we do begin with it, must itself be without explanation, since, if something else were invoked to explain it, then the 'something else' must needs be logically prior to that which it is invoked to explain. Thus the 'something' being explained by a logically prior 'something else' could not have been ultimate."

-- C. E. M. Joad

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

-- Andre Malraux
French author & resistance leader (1901 - 1976)

"When the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us fight—then we find out whether or not we live by faith."

-- Thomas Merton

"That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans."

-- C. S. Lewis (Surprised By Joy, 1955)

"Why be a man when you can be a success?"

-- Bertolt Brecht

“Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

-- Hugh Latimer

"Water is for washing your feet. Beer is for drinking."

-- Kosmo Spoetzl

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

- Douglas Adams

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

-- Oliver Cromwell

"The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgment. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth."

-- John Fahey, describing his piece, "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" as found on the album Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"

-- Charles M. Schulz

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

--H. L. Mencken

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with."

--Tennessee Williams

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Failures are very public, and successes are short lived. It's the pleasure of drawing funny pictures that makes up for it."

--Bill Watterson
US cartoonist (1958 - )

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

-- Tom Lehrer

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"Victory or death!"

-- Col. William Barret Travis

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

-- Lord Acton

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

-- Harry S. Truman

"Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable."

-- Samuel Johnson

“When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing.”

-- Erik Satie

"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised."

-- George F. Will

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."

-- Bertrand Russell

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

-- J.D. Salinger

"Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God."

-- Arvo Pärt

"Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness."

-- Cullen Hightower

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.

The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

--P. J. O'Rourke

"The church that doesn't evangelize will be evangelized by the culture in which it finds itself."

-- William Frey

"Something terrible happens, and you might say, “God help us!” or “Jesus Christ!”—the poor, crippled prayers that are hidden in the minor blasphemies of people for whom in every sense God is dead, except that they still have to speak to him, if only through clenched teeth."

-- Frederick Buechner

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course."

-- A.A. Milne

"Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves."

-- Carl Sagan

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."

-- Karl Marx

"I also told them of the manner in which I had been knocked down and dragged out, and that I didn't consider it a fair fight any how they could fix it. I put the ingredients in the cup pretty strong I tell you, and I concluded my speech by telling them that I was done with politics for the present, and they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas."

-- Col. David Crockett

“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.”

-- Butch Hancock

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."

-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?"

-- Soren Kierkegaard

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

-- Flannery O'Connor

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

-- John Cage

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

-- Blaise Pascal

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."

-- Aldous Huxley

"Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left."

-- David M. Ogilvy

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"

--US Marine Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph "Dan" Daly

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."

-- Joseph Baretti

"A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future."

-- Sidney J. Harris

"Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way."

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The End of the Affair" in the Wall Street Journal

"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."

-- J. Frank Dobie

"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it."

-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Push back against dubious claims that defy logic;
be on the lookout for misrepresentations;
question the lack of science when belief is the substitution;
be very skeptical when the denial of the laws of physics comes into play."

--- jpaik, quoted from Audio Karma

"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."

-- Frank Dane

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love."

-- Søren Kierkegaard

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

-- G.K. Chesterton

"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest person, it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow."

--Edward Sandford Martin

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us."

-- Paul Valery, 1895, French critic & poet (1871 - 1945)

"The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too."

-- Oscar Levant

"In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise."

-- Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United States Senate

"I have held many things in my hands, and have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess."

-- Martin Luther

"Christianity is a battle, not a dream."

-- Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)

"The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on."

--Robert Bloch

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber-barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber-baron's cruelty may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-- C.S. Lewis

"You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of the new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life."

-- Henri Nouwen

"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."

-- Bill Bernbach

"The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection.... I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness---mine, yours, ours---need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life."

-- Parker Palmer

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."

-- Douglas Adams

"Nice is highly overrated."

--Marcus Baker

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

"If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein