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

Page Six

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

Books of Quotations Page

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

Authors S thru Z

Jeffrey D. Sachs
“The only thing that reliably grows in our economy is public debt.”  {blog 2/2010}

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}

J.D. Salinger [1919-2010]
“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms,
not anyone else's.”  {blog 2/2010}

Lord Salisbury [1830-1903]
“If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians,
nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}

David Samuels
“If the dream of self-invention is profoundly democratic, it is also an open invitation to fraud.”  {blog 7/2008}

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}
• • “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine
how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Not often in the story of Mankind does a man arrive on Earth who is both steel and velvet, who is
as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm
and peace unspeakable and perfect.” (describing Abraham Lincoln before Congress in 1959)  {blog 2/2009}

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont
“The great cause of this [financial] crisis is the incredible greed and selfishness that exist
in the ruling elite of America. They have no shame.” (in 2009 speech)  {blog 12/2009}

Charles W. Sanders, Ohio candidate for Congress in 2006 & 2008
“The Bush Administration is perhaps the most unnerving, duplicitous band of pirates
to ever occupy the White House.”  {Issue #62}

Henry Russell 'Red' Sanders [1905-58], football coach at Vanderbilt University
“Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.” {long before Lombardi)  {blog 10/2008}

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}
• • “Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness is the reward of character.”   {blog 4/2009}

Robert W. Sarnoff [1919-97]
“Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.”  {blog 11/2009}

author William Saroyan [1908-81]
• • “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception
would be made in my case. Now what?”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with
everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy – the good and
great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer
is a rebel who never stops.”  (in "The William Saroyan Reader" 1958)   {blog 7/2008}

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}
• • “You have to choose: live or tell stories.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “To me, philosophy is everything. It is the way [that] one lives.”  {blog 9/2009}

Abraham Sategh
“Under Bush, no violent acts against the U.S. have occurred since 9/11. But the cost has been
a legal and spiritual 9/11 every day since.” (Time Magazine Letters 12/2008)  {blog 2/2009}

David 'Mudcat' Saunders, campaign advisor to John Edwards 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}

André Schiffrin
“McCarthyism has not disappeared from the American scene.” (in 2008)  {blog 12/2008}

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}

Charles M. Schultz [1922-2000]
“Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.”  {blog 10/2009}

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}

Joseph Schumpeter [1883-1950]
“Even if you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough people
long enough to do irreversible damage.”  {blog 8/2009}

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}

George Scialabba
“Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable
to superstition and demagoguery.”  {blog 11/2008}

Leonardo Sciascia [1921-89]
“Even true things shouted from loudspeakers start to sound like lies.”  {blog 12/2008}

Martin Scorsese
“There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.”  {blog 7/2010}

Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]
“Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!”
(in the 1808 poem "Marmion")  {blog 5/2009}

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}

movie mogul David O. Selznick [1902-65]
“Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names.”  {blog 4/2009}

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}
• • “When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”  {blog 5/2009}

Victor Serebriakoff [1912-2000], co-founder of American Mensa
“Intelligence is no guarantee against being stupid.”  {Issue #36}

television 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}

Cynthia Propper Seton
“In America, to look a couple of years younger than you actually are is not only an achievement
for which you are to be congratulated, it is patriotic.”  {blog 6/2008}

Dr. Seuss {Theodor Geisel 1904-91}
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.”  {blog 9/2008}

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

Gene Seymour, Newsday critic
“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}
• • “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
in "Twelfth Night" (Act II, Scene 5)  {blog 3/2010}

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]
now has a quotations page of his own: click here

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}

William Shenstone [1714-63]
“The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time
in a foreign one.”  {blog 10/2009}

Wm. Tecumseh Sherman [1820-91]
“I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” (in 1884)  {blog 10/2008}

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 [1903-89]
“Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”  {Issue #37}

William E. Simon [1927-2000]
“Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.”  {blog 5/2009}

author Upton Sinclair [1878-1968]
• • “The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that
practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.”  {blog 5/2008}

Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
• • “We've got to believe in free will, we've got no choice.”  {Issue #37}
• • “The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.”  {blog 3/2010}

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

mystery author team 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}
• • “The choice is clear: either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future
to overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behaviour to create a social environment in which
we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardising the chances that those who
follow us will be able to do the same.” (in 1948)  {blog 7/2010}

Jim Sleeper
“Homeland security patriotism ... has turned the neo-cons' idea of loyalty into a loveless
lock step and their democratic creed into Orwellian sloganeering.”  {blog 2/2009}

William Joseph Slim [1891-1970]
“When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action
you should take, choose the bolder.”  {blog 3/2010}

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 [1865-1946]
“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}

Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University
“Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?”   {blog 4/2009}

Richard Norton Smith
“Cable 'news' [is] largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical, and the tawdry.”  {blog 2/2010}

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}
• • “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.”  {blog 6/2008}

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}

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]
“Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.”  {blog 4/2009}

Helmut Sonnenfeldt
“Henry [Kissinger] does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature.”  {blog 11/2008}

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

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

John B.L. Soule [1815-91]
editor of the Terre Haute, Indiana Express
“[New York Tribune editor] Horace Greeley himself could not give a young man better advice
than "Go west, young man'.” (in 1851)  {blog 10/2008}

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}

Henry Spencer
“Life is so much more meaningful if you take the time to hunt down and strangle
twits who post blather to inappropriate newsgroups.”  {blog 10/2009}

English philosopher Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]
• • “[Creationists] who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts
seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.”  (in an 1852 essay)  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”  {blog 10/2009}

James Gustave Speth
“Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability,
social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force.”  {blog 11/2008}

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}

Lysander Spooner [1808-87]
“The only security men can have for their political liberty,
consists in keeping their money in their own pockets.”   {blog 8/2009}

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}

K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy
“The human ability to innovate out of a jam is profound. That's why Darwin will always be right
and Malthus will always be wrong.”  {blog 12/2009}

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}

Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield [1694-1773]
“Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife,
very often needed but seldom minded.”  {blog 9/2008}

Gen. John Stark [1728-1822]
“Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.”  {blog 8/2009}

author John Steinbeck [1902-68]
John Steinbeck Quotations Page at Working Minds
John Steinbeck Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

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}

Richard Stengel, Time Magazine
“This is the worst economy since the Great Depression.”  {blog 5/2009}

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}
• • “A nation glued to the television screen ... can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash
and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul.” (in 1959)  {blog 5/2009}

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}
• • “We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find
in our travels is an honest friend.”   {blog 5/2009}
• • “Wine is bottled poetry.”  {blog 8/2009}

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

movie director Oliver Stone
• • His motto: “To kiss the lips of women, love the gods, do justice, laugh,
and know [that] the world is mad.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “What kept me going was maybe stubbornness and a lack of good sense.”  {blog 9/2008}

W. Clement Stone [1902-2002]
“You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to
do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice.
Only you have the power to choose for yourself.”  {blog 2/2009}

playwright Tom Stoppard
• • “It is better to know useless things than to know nothing.”  {Issue #53}
• • “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order,
you can nudge the world a little.”  {blog 2/2009}

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

Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-96]
“There are worlds of money wasted, at this [Holiday Season] time of year, in getting things
that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” (in 1850)  {blog 12/2009}

Igor Stravinsky [1882-1971]
“I listen to Beethoven every week, and to Bach twice a week, but to Mozart every day.”  {blog 12/2008}

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}

economist Lawrence Summers
“There are idiots. Look around.”  {blog 4/2010}

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 & blog 1/2008}
• • “We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”  {blog 4/2009}

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-Györgi [1893-1986]
“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}

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone writer
“When one hundred million people don't vote, the nation is not bitterly divided.
The nation mostly doesn't give a sh*t.”  {blog 4/2010}

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}

Shirley Temple
“When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected.”   {blog 4/2009}

Studs Terkel [1912-2008]
“When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective', all else is `propaganda'.”   {blog 4/2010}

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

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

cartoonist Bob Thaves
“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything [that] Fred Astaire did,
but she did it backwards and in high heels.” (in 1982) {not Faith Whittlesey}  {Issue #36}

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas [1914-54]
“Sometimes I write sober and revise drunk, sometimes I write drunk and revise sober.”  {blog 9/2008}

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}
• • “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always
worked for me.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves
and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “I'm an idiot, I'm a fool, I know ... but I've been a good read, right?” (in his suicide note)  {blog 10/2008}
• • “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living.”  {blog 11/2008}

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}
• • “I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable
of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality.
Be not simply good; be good for something.”  {blog 2/2010}

author-cartoonist James Thurber [1894-1961]
• • “Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”  {Issue #62}
• • “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Discussion in America means dissent.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “It's better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations
those of libel.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself
in a great rear-end collision.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.”  {blog 7/2010}

mystery author team Aimée & 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}

Casey Tibbs
“Maybe the American cowboy represents the last of the free men.”  {blog 8/2008}

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 & #91}
• • “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, creator of "Doonesbury"
“Iraq is the new Afghanistan.”  {Issue #53}

film director François Truffaut [1932-84] of France
• • “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}
• • “In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.”  {blog 5/2008}

Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]
33rd President of the United States, 1945-53
“The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.”  {Issue #37}

Bishop Desmond Tutu
• • “I am a prisoner of optimism.”  {Issue #38}
• • “To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.”  {blog 7/2010}

American humorist Mark Twain [1835-1910]
Mark Twain Quotations Page at Working Minds

film critic Kenneth Tynan [1927-80]
“A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.”  {blog 4/2009}

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}

Jonathan Valin
“One of [Reagan's] great gifts to America was the public rebirth of bigotry.”  {blog 9/2009}

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

S.S. Van Dine [1888-1939]
“This would be a cleaner, better world if mankind had been omitted from the scheme of things.”  {blog 6/2010}

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}
• • “Exaggerate the essential; leave the obvious vague.”  {blog 12/2008}

Hendrik Willem van Loon [1882-1944]
“Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.”  {blog 11/2008}

Joost van Steenis
“When nothing is tried nothing will happen.”  {blog 12/2009}

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}

writer Michael Ventura
“After a while you realize that if you're a real writer, then, like all writers, you're finally
at the mercy of your readers. And giving yourself up to them, you just write.”  {blog 9/2008}

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}
• • “The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”  {blog 11/2009}

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 {real name François-Marie Arouet} [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}
• • “Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one
party of the citizens to give to the other.” (in 1764)  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}

columnist Marilyn vos Savant
“A true realist demands the impossible; a true idealist demands the impractical.”  {blog 9/2008}

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}

Alice Walker
“My activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet.” (in 1989)  {blog 5/2009}

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

ex-cop/author Joseph Wambaugh
“I'd rather tangle with a burglar than a television executive any day.”  {blog 5/2008}

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

Earl Warren [1891-1974]
Governor of California [1943-1953]; Chief Justice of the United States [1953-69]
“Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.”  {blog 10/2008}

George Washington [1732-99]
first President of the United States, 1789-97
• • “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 of Los Angeles, CA
“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}

Thomas J. Watson [1874-1956], founder of I.B.M.
“The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}

actor John Wayne [1907-79]
“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when
it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.”
from his controversial 1971 Playboy Magazine interview, and carved onto his tombstone  {blog 7/2010}

U.S. Senator Jim Webb
“Andrew Jackson believed that you don't measure the health of a society
at the apex but at the base.”  {blog 7/2010}

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}

Jack Welch
“An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly,
is the ultimate competitive advantage.”  {blog 4/2008}

auteur Orson Welles [1915-85]
• • “Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Gluttony is not a secret vice.”  {blog 4/2009}

H.G. Wells [1866-1946]
“The future is a race, a race between education and catastrophe.”  {blog 2/2010}

U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone [1944-2002] of Minnesota
• • “Stand up. Keep fighting.”  {Issue #29}
• • “The future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard.”  {blog 6/2008}

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}

beat poet Philip Whalen [1923-2002]
“If you want something, hold out an empty hand. If you want a poem, find a blank page.”  {blog 6/2008}

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}
• • “Inkstands and teacups are never so full as when one upsets them.”  {blog 7/2008}

Townsend Whelen [1877-1961]
“No man is competent unless he can stalk alone and armed in the wilderness.”  {blog 10/2009}

painter James McNeill Whistler [1834-1903]
“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.”  {blog 9/2008}

White Antelope [?-1864], chief of the Cheyenne
“Nothing lives long, only the earth and mountains.”  {blog 6/2008}

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}
• • “It is time [that] men allowed their imaginations to infect their intellect.” (in 1956)  {blog 9/2009}

Katharine White [1892-1977]
“The decrease in the number of mature persons in the world is a shocking indictment
of our civilization.” (in 1938)  {blog 6/2010}

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

Katharine Whitehorn
“The great rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.”  {blog 9/2008}

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}

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", 1891)  {blog 12/2007}
• • “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.”   {blog 2/2009}
• • “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day
that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “With an evening coat and a white tie, even a stockbroker can gain a reputation
for being civilized.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”  {blog 7/2010}

movie director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]
• • “Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles isn't a realist.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “The best director is the one you don't see.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “I just made pictures I would've liked to see.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “I was not a guy writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down
and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think.”  {blog 7/2010}

Kaiser Wilhelm II [1859-1941]
“Morality is all right, but what about dividends?”  {blog 11/2008}

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}

baseball great Ted Williams [1918-2002]
“Don't ever let anyone monkey with your swing.”  {blog 9/2008}

playwright Tennessee Williams [1911-83]
“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”   {blog 8/2009}

William Appleman Williams [1921-90]
“Empire is the only way to honor avarice and morality, the only way to be good and wealthy.”  {blog 9/2009}

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]
28th President of the United States, 1913-21
• • “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}
• • “The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.”  {blog 8/2009}

Oprah Winfrey
“Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.”  {blog 8/2009}

actress Shelley Winters [1920-2006]
“I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short.”  {blog 4/2009}

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 & 5/2009}

Nero Wolfe character, as written by Rex Stout [1886-1975]
“Culture is like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least.”  {blog 1/2010}

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.” (in 2007)  {blog 11/2007}

Willy Wonka (character created by Roald Dahl [1916-90])
“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation,
and 2% butterscotch ripple.”  {blog 3/2010}

critic James Wood
“Contradictions are what make a writer interesting; consistency is for cooking.”  {blog 12/2009}

U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden [1910-2010]
“It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.”  {Issue #25}
see Harry Truman above

Jack Woodford [1894-1971]
“Money talks. And writes. And publishes. And reviews. But it can't read.”  {blog 6/2010}

British author Virginia Woolf [1882-1941]
• • “Anonymous was a woman.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”  {blog 12/2008}

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

William Wordsworth [1750-1850]
“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create
the taste by which he is to be relished.”  {blog 11/2008}

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}
• • “Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters.”  {blog 6/2010}

comedian Steven Wright
• • “You can't have everything, where would you put it?”  {Issue #36}
• • “Is it weird in here, or is it just me?”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”  {blog 7/2010}

Philip Wylie [1902-71]
“If we want a better world, we will have to be a better people.” (1942)  {Issue #40}

Don Yacktman
“The difference between being stubborn and being principled is being right.”  {blog 7/2010}

Irish poet William Butler Yeats [1865-1939]
“Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire.”  {blog 5/2010}

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}

Arnold Zack
“No one on his deathbed ever said 'I wish I had spent more time on my business'.”
(quoted by U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas)  {blog 10/2008}

Fareed Zakaria
“Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, Americans have consumed more than we produced
and have made up the difference by borrowing.”  {blog 3/2010}

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}

Zig Ziglar
“There are only three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch
things happen, and those who wonder 'What happened?'.”  {blog 10/2009}

Howard Zinn [1922-2010]
• • “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}
• • “The history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant,
corporation against worker, rich against poor.”, in 2006  {blog 4/2010}

Émile Zola [1840-1902]
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.”  {blog 7/2010}

Gary Zukav
“The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely
stands in a lonely place.”  {blog 9/2008}

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of DailyKos
“The right's greatest enemy is reality.”  {blog 8/2008}

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