by Curt Kovener
Gleaning from the knowledge and life experience of others, we share some of their thoughts for your edification and contemplation.
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
~Winston Churchill
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage. ~Mark Russell
I’m not an ambulance chaser. I’m usually there before the ambulance.
~Melvin Belli
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
~H. L. Mencken
Silence is argument carried on by other means.
~Ernesto “Che” Guevara
As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
~Josh Billings
It is impossible to feel the equal of someone who’s been awake longer than you.
~Mary Gordon
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
~Garrison Keillor
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
~Samuel Johnson
If you pick up a dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
~Mark Twain
You can’t use tact with a person in Congress. A elected person is a hog. You must take a stick and hit him on the snout.
~Henry Adams
When you consider what a chance women have to poison their husbands, it’s a wonder there isn’t more of it done.
~Kin Hubbard
The most important difference between business and academia is this: In business everything is dog eat dog. In academia it is just the reverse.
~E. John Rosenwald, Jr.
Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.
~Hugh MacLennan
As a member of an escorted tour, you don’t even have to know the Matterhorn isn’t a tuba.
~Temple Fielding
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
~Benjamin Disraeli
In American, an hour is about 40 minutes.
~German Saying
Owing money has never concerned me so long as I know where it could be repaid.
~Colonel Henry Crown
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters are written in prose.
~Beverley Nichols
Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn’t, they be married too.
~H. L. Mencken
There is not money in poetry, but then there is not poetry in money, either.
~Robert Graves
Poets, we know, are very sensitive people, and in my observation, one of the things they are most sensitive about is cash.
~Robert Penn Warren
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
~John Ciardi
People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: Twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; 25% like me for the wrong reasons; 25% hate me for the wrong reasons; 25% hate me for the right reasons. It’s that last 25% that worries me.
~Robert Frost
Originality is the art of concealing your source.
~Franklin P. Jones
The command, “Be fruitful and multiply,” was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two persons.
~Dean William R. Inge
One function of diplomacy is to dress realism in morality.
~Will and Ariel Durant
No man would listen to you if he didn’t know it was his turn next.
~Ed Howe
It is alright to hold a conversation but you should let go of it now and then.
~Richard Armour
One man with courage makes it a majority.
~Andrew Jackson
Man is demolishing nature. We are killing things that keep us alive.
~Thor Heyerdahl
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
~Claude Adrien Helvetius
The great dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
~Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
~Winston Churchill
A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.
~Murray Kempton
The only prize much care for by the powerful is power.
The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
~Wendell L. Willkie
There is no future in any job. The future lies in the man who holds the job.
~Dr. George Crane
If people really liked to work, we’d still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.
~William Feather
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. ~Robert Frost
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside then was superior to circumstances.
~Bruce Barton
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
~Austin O’Malley
In my opinion, we are in danger of developing a cult of the Common Man, which means a cult of mediocrity.
~Herbert Hoover
I reckon there’s as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more.
~Edwards Noyes Wescott
It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle.
~Ashley Montagu
There is only one thing that can keep growing without nourishment: The human ego.
~Marshall Lumsden
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
~William Jennings Bryan
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, “Ours.”
~Vine Deloria, Jr.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
~Henry David Thoreau
Success is the one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows.
~Ambrose Bierce
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
~George Bernard Shaw
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
~Mary Ellen Kelly