Quotations
Used in the 'WMail' Newsletter
and the Dateline Chamesa blog

Page Four

Working Minds Homepage
free monthly 'WMail' Philosophy Newsletter [2000-2007]
Index of All Issues

After WMail Issue #72 in October 2007, essays & quotations & news are being posted to the
Dateline Chamesa weblog

Alphabetical by Author
A thru C • D thru F • G thru J • K thru N • O thru R

on this page: authors S thru Z • Proverbs & Anonymous • Laws of Life

Authors S thru Z

comedian Mort Sahl
• • “I have a case of unrequited love for America.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Only in show business could a guy with a C-minus average be considered an intellectual.”  {blog 2/2008}

James Sallis
“Great writers by definition are outriders, raiders of a sort, sweeping down from wilderness territories to
disturb the peace, overrun the status quo, and throw into question everything [that] we know to be true.”  {Issue #66}

poet Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]
• • “Life is like an onion, you peel off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”  {Issue #36}
• • “I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.”  {blog 12/2007}

Charles W. Sanders, Ohio candidate for Congress in 2006
“The Bush Administration is perhaps the most unnerving, duplicitous band of pirates
to ever occupy the White House.”  {Issue #62}

philosopher George Santayana [1863-1952]
• • “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  {Issue #3}
• • “Americans love junk. It's not the junk that bothers me, it's the love.”  {Issue #40}
• • “A man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.”  {Issue #41}
• • “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”  {Issue #65}
• • “Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand. The whole world is doing things.”  {blog 2/2008}

Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
• • “If you're lonely while you're alone, you're in bad company.”  {Issue #39}
• • “Hell is other people at breakfast.”  {Issue #62}

David 'Mudcat' Saunders, John Edwards campaign advisor in 2007
“The Democratic Party's biggest problem is [that] we can't count, and the Republicans can.”  {blog 2/2008}

Jonathan Schell
“The war in Iraq is a colossol blood-drenched fraud.”  {Issue #64}

Schopenhauer [1788-1860]
“All truth passes thru three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed,
and third it is accepted as self-evident.”  {blog 12/2007}

radio talk show host Ed Schultz
• • “The only place they can shoot you when you are out in front is in the back.”  {Issue #58}
• • “Too bad. The rocks go with the farm.”  {Issue #60}

Evan I. Schwartz
“The conventional view of inventors is [that] they're good at solving problems.
It's really finding problems.”  {Issue #52}

Arnold Schwartzenegger
“Money is da most important thing.”
[at his first political press conference, 6 August 2003]  {Issue #35}

Albert Schweitzer [1875-1965]
• • “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”  {blog 3/2008}

songwriter Bob Seger
“Set yourself the bolder course.”  {Issue #55}

Hubert Selby, Jr. [1928-2004]
“Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got.”  {Issue #43}

George Seldes
“Tell the truth and run.”  {Issue #36}

Dr. Martin Seligman
“So many Americans build their lives around pursuing pleasure. It turns out that engagement
and meaning are much more important components of happiness.”  {Issue #50}

Audry J. Seman of Copper Center, Alaska
“Truth should put a light in your eyes and a skip in your step.”  {Issue #11}

Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
• • “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by rulers as useful.”  {Issue #36}
• • DUCUNT VOLENTUM FATA, NOLENTUM TRAHUNT:
"Fate leads those who are willing; the unwilling it drags.”  {blog 12/2007}

Victor Serebriakoff [1912-2000]
“Intelligence is no guarantee against being stupid.”  {Issue #36}

tv writer Rod Serling [1924-75]
• • “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout.
There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search
for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own.”  {Issue #63}
• • “It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every
twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”  {Issue #64}

Linda Sexson
“Art is the work that is play.”  {Issue #52}

Newsday critic Gene Seymour
“These may indeed be the days of miracle and wonder, but we're still just
as f*cked-up-and-full-of-it as we always were.”  {Issue #71}

Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
“Blow wind! Come wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back.”
(in "Macbeth" 1606, Act 5 Scene 5)  {Issue #64}
• • “Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.”
(in "Measure For Measure" 1603, Act 1 Scene 4)  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”  {blog 2/2008}

mystery author Dell Shannon
“[Organized religion] is the most successful con game ever put over on the human race. You'd think
we'd have seen thru it in a quarter of a million years or so, but most people never seem to.”  {Issue #39}

Artie Shaw [1910-2004]
“People are entitled to be judged by their best ... because everything else is accidents that
happen along the way. When a guy does something important, he deserves credit because
it's hard to do. You do it in spite of the world.”  {Issue #49}

British writer George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
• • “A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul
can be assured of the support of Paul.”  {Issue #20}
• • “The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.”  {Issue #25}
• • “All great truths begin as blasphemies.”  {Issue #28}
• • “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”  {Issue #36}
• • “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Some men see things as they are and ask 'why?'. Others dream things that never were
and ask 'why not?'.”  {Issue #42}
• • “The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.”  {Issue #60}
• • “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying
to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”  {blog 12/2007}

Harry Shearer
“I think [the Fox Network] has been indisputably a force for evil in the world.”  {Issue #41}

English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley [1792-1827]
“Shake off your chains like dew / You are many, they are few.”  {Issue #56}

David K. Shipler
“Half the working poor [in America] are working mothers ... It is time to be ashamed.”
["The Working Poor" Knopf 2004]  {Issues #43 & #46}

Beth Shulman, Russell Sage Foundation
“It is a blight on our democracy that in the richest country in the world,
workers cannot support themselves and their families.”  {Issue #46}

Dave Shulman
“Do you remember the last time [that] anyone was terrorized by agnostic fundamentalists?”
(letter to L.A. Weekly October 2001)  {Issue #43}

Finnish composer Jan Sibelius [1865-1957]
“No one ever erected a statue to a music critic.”  {Issue #50}

Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Perhaps ... the world will come to us, in unmediated purposefulness,
if we look at it hard enough and promise to be good.”   {Issue #21}

Georges Simenon
“Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”  {Issue #37}

Isaac Bashevis Singer
“We've got to believe in free will, we've got no choice.”  {Issue #37}

Frédérik Sisa
“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to neo-conservatism.”  {Issue #49}

mystery authors Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö
• • “The law has been designed to protect certain social classes and their dubious interests,
and otherwise seems mostly to consist of loopholes.”  {Issue #38}
• • “She was herself and not his; perhaps that was the best thing about her.”
(in "The Terrorists" 1976)  {Issue #43}

American psychologist B.F. Skinner [1904-90]
• • “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.”  {blog 1/2008}

Christine Smallwood
“All important writers [ask] us to consider if this is the way it has to be.”  {Issue #59}

Jane Smiley
“[Art] only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.”  {blog 12/2007}

Logan Pearsall Smith
“There are two things to aim at in life: First, to get what you want, and then to enjoy it.
Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.”  {blog 3/2008}

Jan Smuts [1870-1950]
“When in doubt, do the courageous thing.”  {Issue #50}

Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]
“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”  {Issue #43}

Brad Solomon
“When the people who are supposed to be running this country go around saying [that] they aren't crooks
and everyone knows [that] they are, this country is in very big trouble.”  {Issue #55}

Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
“Be serious, be passionate, wake up!”  {Issue #49}

Aaron Sorkin
“Decisions are made by those who show up.”  {Issue #23}

Larry Speakes, Reagan's White House spokesperson
“If you tell a story five times, it's true.”  {Issue #37}

Gerry Spence
“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”  {Issue #42}

Mickey Spillane [1918-2006]
“Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown,
they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.”  {Issue #67}

Spinoza [1632-77]
• • “Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity.”  {Issue #18}
• • “All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”  {Issue #53}
• • “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”  {blog 10/2007}

Norman Spinrad
“The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life
is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.”  {Issue #71}

Bruce Springsteen
• • “It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.”  {Issue #53}
• • “You were born with the power of a locomotive.”  {Issue #53}

Joseph Stalin [1878-1953]
“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes
decide everything.”  {Issue #56}

Sylvester Stallone
“Old men start wars, young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural.
Peace is an accident. We're animals.” (thesis of "Rambo" [2008], cut from the film)   {blog 2/2008}

author John Steinbeck [1902-68]
• • “Joseph McCarthy proved [that] the more ridiculous the charge,
the less possibility there is of defense.” (in "America & Americans" 1968)  {Issue #36}
• • “Most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which
is one of the prized and used and desired reactions of our species,
is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related
to the whole thing.” (from "Sea of Cortez" 1941)  {Issue #39}
• • “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world.
And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”  {Issue #65}
• • “Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only
write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation,
and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.”  {Issue #69}
• • “I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some
affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’ re in it... Montana seems
to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts ... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.”  {Issue #69}
• • “This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
And this I would fight for: The freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
And this I must fight against: Any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”  {Issue #69}

Gloria Steinem
• • “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
G.E. Nordell: “Let's not be sexist: A man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle.”  {Issue #36}
• • “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”  {Issue #62}

Jay Stevens of Long Beach, California
“Bush's deficits have to be brought under control now, or it really won't matter
what we do about Social Security in the future.”  {Issue #49}

American statesman Adlai E. Stevenson [1900-65]
• • “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” {Issue #36}
• • “What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean
is a sense of national responsibility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion,
but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”  {Issue #61}

author Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894]
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow
anonymous benefits upon the world.”  {blog 12/2007}

I.F. Stone [1907-89]
“All governments are liars.”  {Issue #56}

playwright Tom Stoppard
“It is better to know useless things than to know nothing.”  {Issue #53}

author Rex Stout [1886-1975]
“There is no such thing as a minus quantity except in mathematics.”  {Issue #57}

writer-director Preston Sturges [1898-1959]
“Nothing is too much trouble for the busy man. If you ever want anything done,
always ask the busy man. The others never have time.”  {Issue #70}

Andrew Sullivan, Time Magazine
“Cover-ups are not as common in human history as screw-ups.”  {Issue #41}

Suzuki Shunryu Daiosho
• • “The world is its own magic.”  {Issue #13}
• • “In activity there should be calmness, and in calmness there should be activity.”  {Issue #53}

Jonathan Swift [1667–1745]
• • “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”  {Issue #45}
• • “When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”  {Issue #67}
• • “When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all
in confederacy against him.”  {blog 1/2008}

Herbert Bayard Swope [1882-1958]
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula
for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.”  {Issue #43}

Publilius Syrus [First Century B.C.E.]
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”  {Issue #70}

Albert Szent-Gyorgi
“Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen
and thinking what no one else has thought.”  {Issue #18}

Antonio Tabucchi
“It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.”  {blog 2/2008}

Tao Te Ching
“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.”  {Issue #43}

radio talk show host Stacy Taylor
“The situation is fluid.”  {blog 11/2007}

Scot Tempesta {aka Scooter}, host on K.L.S.D. talk radio in San Diego, CA
“When the media puts the truth next to a lie, that's not balance, that's distortion.”   {Issue #64}

Jervey Tervalon
“The impulse to write fiction is a function of living your life as though it is important.”  {Issue #66}

Nikola Tesla [1856-1943]
“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.”  {Issue #14}

Lewis Thomas
“The urge to be useful is probably more important to [humans] than survival,
or feeding, or propagating, or anything else.”  {Issue #45}

gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
• • “[America is] a dead broke nation at war with all but three or four countries
in the world, and three of those don't count.”  {Issue #50}
• • “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”  {Issue #66}

silent movie star Fred C. Thomson [1890-1928]
“The most effective idealist is one who is nine-tenths entertainer.”  {blog 10/2007}

Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
• • “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”  {Issue #23}
• • “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”  {Issue #32}
• • “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect,
and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”  {Issue #42}
• • “Men have become tools of their tools.”  {Issue #51}
• • “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” (in "Walden", 1854)  {Issue #61}
• • “It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”  {Issue #70}

author-cartoonist James Thurber [1894-1961]
“Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”  {Issue #62}

mystery author team Aimee & David Thurlo
“Religious beliefs, no matter the culture, seldom depend on logic and rationality
and often bring out the worst in people.”  {blog 12/2007}

Tiberius Caesar [42 B.C.E. – 37 A.D.]
“How eager you all are to become slaves.”  {Issue #57}

Patrick Tillman Sr, father of sports star & war hero Pat Tillman [1976-2004]
“The path to true patriotism is confronting your government when it lies.”  {Issue #54}

Alvin Toffler
“Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.” (1990)  {Issue #36}

Lily Tomlin
• • “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.” {Issues #7 & #34}
• • “I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.”  {Issue #36}
• • “For fast acting relief, try slowing down.”  {Issue #62}

Tolstoy [1828-1910]
“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”  {Issue #36}

historian Arnold J. Toynbee [1889-1975]
“The perversity of human nature is the greatest of the mysteries of human life.”  {Issue #68}

Garry Trudeau ["Doonesbury"]
“Iraq is the new Afghanistan.”  {Issue #53}

French film director François Truffaut [1932-84]
• • “When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when
the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Life is hard, but it's wonderful.” (in "Small Change", 1976)  {blog 1/2008}

Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]
“The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.”  {Issue #37}

Desmond Tutu
“I am a prisoner of optimism.”  {Issue #38}

American humorist Mark Twain [1835-1910]
now has a quotations page of his own: click here

Ernestine Ulmer
“Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”  {Issue #36}

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
“Well behaved women rarely make history.”  {Issue #58}

author John Updike
“I'm more and more easily disgusted by the fact that we're living in this society committed to making us
spend more than we have, or more than we should, for stuff we don't really need or want, and that
furthermore is killing us slowly as well as filling all the landfills and making the birds sing less.”  {Issue #61}

actor Sir Peter Ustinov [1921-2004]
“Terrorism is the war of the poor and war is the terrorism of the rich.”  {Issue #68}

Paul Valéry
• • “That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”  {blog 3/2008}

Gerardus van der Leeuw
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”  {Issue #21}

Vincent van Gogh [1853-90]
“There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to
warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”  {Issue #39}

Bill Vaughn
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street
to vote in a national election.”  {blog 12/2007}

Norman Vaughn [1905-2005]
“Dream big and dare to fail.”  {Issue #56}

Gore Vidal
• • “The Gas & Oil Junta (and) the Pentagon govern the United States.”  {Issue #26}
• • “[America] is a totally corrupt society.”  {Issue #37}  full article
• • “Advertising is the only art form [that] America invented and developed.”  {Issue #66}
• • “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”  {blog 1/2008}

Victor Villaseñor
“We need to lift up each other's spirit.”  {Issue #49}

Stephen Vizinczey
“Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity,
and formal education positively fortifies it.”  {Issue #36}

Voltaire [1694-1778]
• • “Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never
do any harm to the world.”  {Issue #22}
• • “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”  {Issue #36}
• • “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”  (in "Candide")  {Issue #43}
• • “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power
to make you commit injustices.”  {Issue #59}
• • “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”  {Issue #62}
• • “It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility
to the opinions [that] they attack.”  {blog 2/2008}

Otto von Bismarck [1815-98]
“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”  {Issue #59}

Ludwig von Mises [1881-1973]
• • “It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman,
and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression
are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.”  {Issue #21}
• • “In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.”  {Issue #36}

author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
• • “The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly,
is that it enables one's soul to grow.” (Writers' Digest Sept 2001)  {Issue #16}
• • “Judgment Day ... could easily be next Wednesday.”  {Issue #33}
• • “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages – they haven't ended yet.”  {Issue #34}
• • “There is no reason [that] good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized
along the lines of the Mafia.”  {Issue #56}
• • “We are here on earth to f*rt around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”  {Issue #62}
• • “The life that awaits after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them [that] they are superior.”
{blog 10/2007}

Dr. Mark Vonnegut as quoted by his son, Kurt
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”  {Issue #43}

Jane Wagner
• • “No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.”  {Issue #36}
• • “I personally think [that] we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.”  {Issue #65}

pianist Cecil Walker
“I consider [my life] a private performance that will never be repeated.”  {Issue #57}

William A. Ward
“Adversity causes some men to break, others to break records.”  {Issue #60}

George Washington [1732-99]
• • “The Government of the United States is not, in any sense,
founded on the Christian religion.” (1796)  {Issue #17}
Alternate source for above: Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, which was unanimously ratified
by the U.S. Senate on 7 June 1797 and signed by President John Adams.
• • “If we must perish in the fight, Oh! Let us die like men.”  {Issue #25}
• • “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”  {Issue #65}
• • “The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens
unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.”  {blog 12/2007}

U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters
“President Bush is incompetent.”  {Issue #62}

James D. Watson
“Knowledge liberates mankind from superstition.”  {Issue #55}

Lyall Watson
“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, [then] we would be so simple
[that] we couldn't.”  {blog 1/2008}

Alan W. Watts [1915-73]
• • “My humanity [is] the only thing that makes me different from a machine ...
the effort of will to take control of myself and change.”  {Issue #11}
• • “The secret of happiness lies in the ancient saying 'Become what you are'.”  {Issue #23}

Daniel Webster [1782-1852]
“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern.
They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”  {Issue #71}

Stephen H. Weentland of Houston, Texas
“The Bush administration has taken politics from the gutter into the sewers.”  {blog 10/2007}

Steven Weinberg
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing
evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”  {blog 3/2008}

auteur  Orson Welles [1915-85]
“Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.”  {Issue #36}

U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone [1944-2002] of Minnesota
“Stand up. Keep fighting.”  {Issue #29}

Robert Westbrook
“I hate how the white masters of the universe have squeezed and exploited every last square inch
of earth for every penny [that] they can get. There's nothing left, nothing [that] they haven't ruined.”
{blog 10/2007}

Edith Wharton [1862-1937]
• • “If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.”  {Issue #50}
• • “The only way to judge an artist is by his works.”  {Issue #71}

E.B. White [1899-1985]
“There's no limit to how complicated things can get on account of one thing leading to another.”  {Issue #57}

Ron White
“You can't fix stupid.”  {blog 10/2007}

Walt Whitman [1819-92]
“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons.
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”  {Issue #43}

Faith Whittlesey
“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did,
but she did it backwards and in high heels.”  {Issue #36}

Elie Wiesel
• • “Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which
he exercises over himself.”  {Issue #46}
• • “There should be a biblical commandment 'Thou shalt not hate'.”  {Issue #57}

Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
• • “Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”  {Issue #45}
• • “Murder is always a mistake – one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.”
(in "The Picture of Dorian Gray")  {blog 12/2007}

Jon K. Williams of Santa Barbara, California
“Under the new Republican lie factory [our country is becoming] an international pariah
and a government of the crooked, by the crooked and for the crooked.”  {Issue #51}

Owen Williamson
“The class warfare that is being waged by the great rich against the greater majority is not just a slogan.
It is as heartless as terrorism, as real as death, and expanding in scope day by day.”  {blog 10/2007}

Sir Henry Wilson
“Either you must govern or you must be governed.”  {Issue #34}

former Ambassador Joe Wilson
“Bob Novak is a compulsive liar.” (November 2007)  {blog 11/2007}

Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924]
“I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased
to be in love with liberty.” (inscribed on a plaque inside the base of the Statue of Liberty)  {blog 12/2007}

Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]
• • “What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”  {Issue #49}
• • “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys
of silliness.”  {blog 2/2008}

Thomas Wolfe [1900-38]
“Loneliness . . . is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.”  {blog 3/2008}

Tom Wolfe
“The dark night of fascism is descending upon America.” (2007)  {blog 11/2007}

U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden
“It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.”  {Issue #25}
see Harry Truman above

Alexander Woollcott [1887-1943]
“All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.”  {Issue #36}

British author Virginia Woolf
“Anonymous was a woman.”  {Issue #36}

architect Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]
• • “The space within becomes the reality.”  {Issue #40}
• • “A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”  {Issue #43}
• • “I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.”  {Issue #45}
• • “A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this:
individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy
is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.”  {Issue #47}

Steven Wright
“You can't have everything, where would you put it?”  {Issue #36}

Philip Wylie
“If we want a better world, we will have to be a better people.” (1942)  {Issue #40}

Yoda (in 'Star Wars I')
“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate to suffering.”  {Issue #21}
Frédérik Sisa: “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to neo-conservatism.”  {Issue #49}

Lin Yu-T’ang [1895-1976]
“Hope is like a road in the country; there wasn't ever a road,
but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”  {Issue #62}

Emiliano Zapata [1879-1919[
“It is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.”  {Issue #17}

musician Frank Zappa [1940-93]
• • “Most talk journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk
for people who can't read.”  {Issue #51}
• • “There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”  {Issue #59}

Howard Zinn
• • “The Mainstream is polluted.”  {Issue #39}
• • “We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts,
when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world ... and to live now as we think human beings
should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”  {Issues #48 & #56}

Proverbs & Anonymous

“Nothing is required for the triumph of evil but that good men do nothing.”
— quoted by John F. Kennedy, often attributed to
Edmund Burke, but actual origin unknown  {Issue #3}

“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
— Chinese proverb   {Issue #10}

“Do Right & Fear Not”
— sign in captain's cabin on 1863 museum ship Star of India
in San Diego, California  {Issue #13}

“Take what you want and pay for it, says God.”
— Spanish proverb  {Issue #23}

“Great souls have wills; feeble souls have wishes.”
— Chinese proverb   {Issue #27}

“Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned
to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children.” — Native American proverb  {Issue #32}

“Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty. The pig likes it.”
— old saying  {Issue #32}

“If it's in your way, knock it over.”
— Klingon proverb  {Issue #36}

“If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?”
— unknown  {Issue #36}

“The wicked flourish like a green bay tree.”
— British saying (after Psalm 37:35}  {Issue #36}

“Life is short, but wide.”
— Spanish proverb  {Issue #36}

“Opportunity doesn't knock anymore, it just beeps as it drives by.”
— Comerica Bank ad 2003  {Issue #36}

“The very rich forfeit barely 1% of their net worth to the U.S. Treasury every year.”
— Forbes Magazine, Oct 2003  {Issue #37}

“Canta che ti passa!”  [Sing and it will pass!]
— Italian proverb  {Issue #38}

“When it becomes clear [that] no one else shares your level of passion,
you are where you belong.” — Rolex ad 2003  {Issue #39}

“Thorns have roses.”
— old saying  {Issue #40}

“The Bush Administration's 2005 budget is a masterpiece of disengenuous
blame-shifting, dishonest budgeting, and irresponsible governing.”
— Washington Post editorial, February 2004  {Issue #41}

“Nothing could be worse than turning 40, 50 or 60 years old with nothing
but TV viewing and work as your legacy.” — unknown  {Issue #41}

“You can have a lord, you can have a king, but the man to fear is the tax collector.”
— Sumerian saying, circa 1800 B.C.E.  {Issue #43}

“Failure is not an option... It's included with the software.”
— unknown  {Issue #43}

“Any man who could concentrate for as much as three minutes on any
given problem could rule the world.” — Chinese saying  {Issue #43}

“[Americans] work more hours than workers in any other industrialized
country except South Korea.”
— Program on WorkLife Law at American University Washington College of Law  {Issue #46}

“There was an era in America when a family could live comfortably on the income
of just one worker. But that's not so any more.”
— Los Angeles Times editorial, December 2004  {Issue #49}

“This is the B.B.C. Home Service. There is no news.”
— actual radio news broadcast, circa 1930  {Issue #49}

“Fifty percent of the population are below average.” — anonymous  {Issue #49}

“You get what you pay for..”
— Arbuckle Coffee slogan, circa 1900  {Issue #51}

“Stand back! I'm an eagle.”
— American saying  {Issue #52}

“The news is first.”
— N.P.R. Radio slogan  {Issue #54}

“Keep your eyes upon the road / And your hands upon the wheel”
— The Doors band song lyric  {Issue #55}

“The economic status quo cannot be maintained long into the future. If radical changes are not made,
we face loss of well-being and possible ecological catastrophe.”
— Scientific American Magazine, September 2005  {Issue #55}

“Live your life like you're not afraid to die.”
— country western song, 2005  {Issues #59 & #62}

“The white men are like locusts.”
— DreamWorks mini-series, 2005  {Issue #60}

“Poco a poco se anda lejos."  (Little by little, one can go far.)”
— Hispanic-American dicho {saying}  {Issue #60}

“If you want to succeed in business, don't get an MBA. Study philosophy instead.”
— The Atlantic Monthly subhead, June 2006  {Issue #60}

“Plant trees. Plant lots of trees."
— ending credits of Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth"  {Issue #61}

“It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
— from the 1955 play "Inherit The Wind" by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee  {Issue #61}

“A challenge does not build character, it merely reveals it.”
— mutual fund commercial, 2006  {Issue #61}

“Only when lions get to write history will hunters cease to be heroes.”
— African proverb  {Issue #62}

“Beer has food value, but food has no beer value.”
— motto of Second Street Brewery in Santa Fe, New Mexico  {Issue #62}

“Support our oops.” — new bumper sticker  {Issue #64}
“You go, Hugo!” — another bumper sticker  {Issue #64}

“If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat?”  {Issue #66}
— slogan at Rudy's Country Store & Bar-B-Q in Albuquerque, NM

“Do not be surprised if the horse that you are riding takes you in the direction that you are headed.”
— ancient Chinese saying  {Issue #68}

“Where's all the freedom / that we're fighting for?”
— Merle Haggard song lyric  {Issue #68}

“Never get a tattoo where a judge can see it.” — old saying  {Issue #70}
“That's good advice.” — Judge John P. Pope, Valencia County, New Mexico

“Louisiana doesn’t tolerate corrupt politicians, it demands them.”
— local saying  {Issue #70}

“Carpe Mañana” — Santa Fe, New Mexico bumper sticker  {Issue #70}

“If you wish to go fast, go alone. If you wish to go far, go together."
— African proverb  {Issue #71}

“Jail To The Chief” — new bumper sticker  {Issue #71}

“Who Would Jesus Bomb?” — bumper sticker  {blog 10/2007}

“Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.”
— Upanishads  {blog 11/2007}

“Growing old is mandatory / Growing up is optional” — t-shirt  {blog 11/2007}

“An intellectual is someone who can find something more interesting than sex.”
— anonymous  {blog 11/2007}

“Genius is the ability to avoid work by doing it right the first time.”
— old saying  {blog 1/2008}

“Every animal knows more than you do.”
— Nez Perce proverb  {blog 1/2008}

“Give Light and the people will find their own way.”
— masthead motto of the Rocky Mountain News [est. 1859] of Denver, Colorado  {blog 1/2008}

“You don't get to be the best because you're the oldest,
you get to be the oldest because you're the best.”
— Bushmill's Whiskey ad  {blog 2/2008}

“Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.”
— Western saying  {blog 2/2008}

“You can have that done one of two ways – fast or good.”
— old saying  {blog 3/2008}

“Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.”
— Lebanese proverb  {blog 3/2008}

“There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.”
— Chinese proverb  {blog 3/2008}

Laws of Life

Nordell's Hypothesis
“If things were different, things would be different.”  {Issue #36}

The original Murphy's Law,
created by John Paul Strapp, Edward A. Murphy, Jr. & George Nichols in 1949, reads:
“If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways
can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.”  {Issue #36}

Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives ['folk' version of Murphy]
“Anything that can go wrong, will”.  {Issue #36}

Agnes Allen's Law
“Everything is easier to get into than out of.”  {Issue #36}

Benford's Law of Controversy
“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”  {Issue #36}

Dirac's Corollary
“The speaker who knows least talks longest.”  {Issue #43}

Donald Duck's Law
“Everything is in the last place that you look.”  {Issue #36}

The Great Law of Sociology
“Some people do, and some people don't.”  {Issue #41}

Gumperson's Law
“The chances of something happening are inversely proportional
to the desire for it to happen.”  {Issue #37}

Hillel's Golden Rule
"Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.”  {Issue #67}

Kettering's Law
“Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.”  {Issue #36}

Occam's Razor from William of Ockham [1285?-1349]
“Do not posit that which is unnecessary.”
**original “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate”
{“Plurality should not be posited without necessity.”}
**also “Simpler is better.”
**also “The simplest hypothesis is most likely to be correct.”  {Issue #38}

O'Toole's Commentary
“Murphy was an optimist.”  {Issue #51}

The Peter Principle
“People rise in an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.”  {Issue #36}

[Theodore] Sturgeon's Law
“Ninety percent of everything is [crud].”  {Issue #36}

back to Page One of WM Quotes [A thru C]
back to Page Two of WM Quotes [D thru J]
back to Page Three of WM Quotes [K thru R]

here on Page Four of WM Quotes:
authors S thru Z • Proverbs & Anonymous • Laws of Life

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