Quotations about Computers

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog. ~Doug Larson


If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That'll do them in. ~Author Unknown


The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. ~Author Unknown


Never let a computer know you're in a hurry. ~Author Unknown


To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. ~Bill Vaughan, 1969 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months. ~Clifford Stoll


User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot." ~Dave Barry


Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. ~Edsger W. Dijkstra


Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~Joseph Campbell


Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. ~Nicholas Negroponte


Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
~David Dixon, 1998, winning entry of the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


Computers, huh? I've heard it all boils down to just a bunch of ones and zeroes.... I don't know how that enables me to see naked women, but however it works, God bless you guys. ~From the television show King of Queens, spoken by the character Doug Heffernan


After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy. ~John Pierce


Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is. ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top


But they are useless. They can only give you answers. ~Pablo Picasso, about computers


Computers have lots of memory but no imagination. ~Author Unknown


Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
~Suzie Wagner, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It's just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws. ~Scott Adams ("Dogbert")


If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. ~Scott Adams


Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes. ~Dave Barry,Claw Your Way to the Top


A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. ~Mitch Ratcliffe


Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse? ~Author Unknown


Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. ~Andy Rooney


Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it. ~Author Unknown


Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked. ~Jeff Pesis


I haven't lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere. ~Author Unknown


I just wish my mouth had a backspace key. ~Author Unknown


Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working. ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top


Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. ~Robert A. Heinlein


If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. ~One of Murphy's Laws of Technology


A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space. ~Author Unknown

If it draws blood, it's hardware. ~Author Unknown


In God we trust, all others we virus scan. ~Author Unknown


It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate. ~Nicholas P. Negroponte


Rebooting is a wonder drug - it fixes almost everything. ~Garrett Hazel, "Help Desk Blues," 2002


A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind. ~Joseph Weizenbaum


Jesus saves! The rest of us better make backups. ~Author Unknown


Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. ~John F. Kennedy


RAM disk is not an installation procedure. ~Author Unknown


The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord. ~Author Unknown


The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec. ~Marcus Dolengo


The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little. ~Eric Porterfield


Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match. But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role. The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them. In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise. ~David Moschella


Do files get embarrassed when they're unzipped? ~Author Unknown


What do you call a doctor that fixes websites? A URLologist. ~Author Unknown


Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
~Margaret Segall, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. ~Edsger W. Dijkstra


The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. ~Sydney J. Harris


There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. ~Author Unknown


There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network. ~Guy Almes


Truth is, I wouldn't know a gigabyte from a snakebite. ~Dolly Parton


Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening windows. ~Author Unknown


Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
~Peter Rothman, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other. ~Bill Gates


There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We do not believe this to be a coincidence. ~Jeremy S. Anderson


My computer kept beating the pants off me at chess, until I discovered that it was no match against me at kickboxing. ~Author Unknown


Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down
~David Ansel, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them! ~Richard P. Feynman


There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer. ~J.H. Goldfuss


Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software. ~Author Unknown


I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss. ~Dave Barry


A user and his leisure time are soon parted. ~Author Unknown


Apathy Error: Don't bother striking any key. ~Author Unknown


At least my pencil never crashes! ~Author Unknown


There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge
~Rahul Sonnad, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form. ~Author Unknown


Home is where you hang your @. ~Author Unknown


To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy
~Brian M. Porter, 1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com


I wish life had an Undo function. ~Author Unknown


In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it. ~Author Unknown


If Bill Gates had a dime for every time Windows crashes... oh, wait a minute, he already does. ~Author Unknown


In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers. ~Richard Power


Mac users swear by their computers. PC users swear at their computers. ~Author Unknown


I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end." ~Douglas Adams


Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. ~Werner von Braun


Microsoft, where quality is job 1.1. ~Author Unknown


Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating. ~Martin Reiser, quoted by Nicklaus Wirth, 1995, which spawned "Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away," author unknown, referring to CEOs of Intel and Microsoft


Some people can hack it, others can't. ~Author Unknown


The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad! ~Richard Feynman


Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. ~Doug Gwyn


Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. ~Dennis Ritchie


Unix never says "please." ~Rob Pike


The Unix philosophy basically involves giving you just enough rope to hang yourself. And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure. ~Author Unknown


Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result. ~Alan Turing, about computers


What boots up must come down. ~Author Unknown


Windows is just DOS in drag. ~Author Unknown


Computers must be female. No one but the creator understands their internal logic. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else. The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you." Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for later retrieval. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it. ~Author Unknown


Computers must be male. As soon as you commit to one you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on. Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the day. ~Author Unknown

Quotations About Compliments

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Some folks pay a compliment like they went down in their pocket for it. ~Kin Hubbard


Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are. ~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1899


'Twas never merry world
Since lowly feigning was called compliment.
~William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night


I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it. ~Wilson Mizner


I can live for two months on a good compliment. ~Mark Twain


What flatterers say, try to make true. ~German Proverb


Pay with compliments and you will always be wealthy. ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com


It is great to get praise from the lips of taciturnity. ~John Addington Symonds


A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it. ~A.W. Hare & J.C. Hare, Guesses at Truth


Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise. ~Lord Chesterfield


Current among men,
Like coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.
~Lord Alfred Tennyson, Princess


Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs. ~George Chapman


A person given to barefaced flattery, will usually balance the account with interest in your absence. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare,Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


It is hard to resist a flatterer who gets it right. ~Robert Brault,www.robertbrault.com


God was just showing off when he created you. ~From the movie Keeping the Faith


Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore


That guy has muscles in places most people don't have places. ~Bucky Waters, on Tom Hammonds


Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
~Hartley Coleridge


The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence. ~Edward Thomas


Marge, you're as pretty as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda. ~Homer Simpson

Quotations about Complaining

When any fit of gloominess, or perversion of mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints. ~Samuel Johnson


If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book


You can overcome anything if you don't bellyache. ~Bernard M. Baruch


I think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons is a Divine instinct. ~Robert Hugh Benson


Oh, wouldn't the world seem dull and flat with nothing whatever to grumble at? ~W.S. Gilbert


I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. ~Jane Wagner


Untold suffering seldom is. ~Franklin P. Jones


I will not be as those who spend the day in complaining of headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints. ~William Osler


In trying to get our own way, we should remember that kisses are sweeter than whine. ~Author Unknown


I can't complain, but sometimes I still do. ~Joe Walsh


Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. ~Og Mandino


It is no use to grumble and complain;
It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain -
Why, rain's my choice.
~James Whitcomb Riley


Sweat silently. Let's have no squawking about a little expenditure of energy. ~Martin H. Fischer


The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. ~Randall Jarrell


Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future. ~Antoine Rivarol


The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects. ~Lord Jeffrey


People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to that you can't please. ~Will Rogers


Instead of complaining that the rosebush is full of thorns, be happy that the thorn bush has roses. ~Proverb


To make a criticism is a bit like complaining about the shape of the Pyramids. ~Author Unknown


The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain. ~Ronald Firbank

Quotations about Community

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. ~George Bernard Shaw


The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor. ~Hubert H. Humphrey


One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell


While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many. ~Lady Bird Johnson


Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself. ~Haniel Long


We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future. ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


"Independence"... [is] middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. ~G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912


A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes - so check your value to the community. ~Martin H. Fischer


On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers. ~Adlai E. Stevenson


I nod to a passing stranger, and the stranger nods back, and two human beings go off, feeling a little less anonymous. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Man's greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors. ~Elbert Hubbard


In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems. ~Martin H. Fischer


A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's. ~Richard Whately


We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. ~Herman Melville


Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Quotations about Committees & Meetings

To get something done a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent. ~Robert Copeland


A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours. ~Milton Berle


To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect weapon. ~Author Unknown


If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings." ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That'll do them in. ~Author Unknown


Our age will be known as the age of committees. ~Ernest Benn


A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. ~Barnett Cocks, attributed


If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock. ~Arthur Goldberg


A committee is an animal with four back legs. ~John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy


It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. ~H.L. Mencken


A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray." ~Alan Sherman


Football is a mistake. It combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings. ~George Will


A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. ~Elbert Hubbard


A camel looks like a horse that was planned by a committee. ~Author Unknown


A committee is a group of the unwilling chosen form the unfit, to do the unnecessary. ~Author Unknown


If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee. ~Author Unknown


Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?... Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam. ~Alfred Whitney Griswold


We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist. ~Frank Moore Colby


I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book. ~Arnold Toynbee


There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee. ~Lester J. Pourciau


Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to. ~Katharine Whitehorn


Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything. ~John Kenneth Galbraith


People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. ~Thomas Sowell

Quotations about College

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students. ~John Ciardi


Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates. ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell


A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. ~Theodore Roosevelt


If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing... you have a college degree. ~Author Unknown


If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you. ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961


It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge. ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951


A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. ~W.H. Auden


The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving. ~Russell Green


A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B. ~"Fats" Domino


Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or they didn't. ~L.L. Hendren


College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night? ~David Wood


A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


Does college pay? They do if you are a good open-field runner. ~Will Rogers


A college education shows a man how little other people know. ~Thomas Chandler Haliburton


The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another. ~J. Frank Dobie


I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's. ~Alex Karras


The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure. ~Sydney J. Harris


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture. ~Elbert Hubbard


College is a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage. ~George Gobel


A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job. ~Caroline Bird


I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes. ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952


The new appears as a minority point of view, and hence is unpopular. The function of a university is to give it a sanctuary. ~Martin H. Fischer


I have a degree in liberal arts. Do you want fries with that? ~Author unknown, as seen on a T-shirt


Hitler destroyed the German university with design; we destroyed ourswithout. ~Martin H. Fischer


No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. ~J. Robert Oppenheimer


The purpose of primary education is the development of your weak characteristics; the purpose of university education, the development of your strong. ~Nevin Fenneman


I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it. ~Peter DeVries


Standardization is the fertilizer of college education. A little may be useful, but flowers do not grow in pure manure. ~Martin H. Fischer


The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money. ~Author Unknown


The elective system offered a bewildering freedom of choice, leaving some graduates with the impression that they had nibbled at dozens of canapés of knowledge and never had their fill. ~Ted Morgan


The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in. ~Robert J. Kibbee


A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. ~Robert G. Ingersoll


A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000. ~Leonard L. Levinson

Quotations about Coffee & Caffeine

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "Over the Teacups," 1891


No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness. ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir


Over second and third cups flow matters of high finance, high state, common gossip and low comedy. [Coffee] is a social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so. From roadside mugs to the classic demi-tasse, it is the perfect democrat. ~Author Unknown


No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils. ~Henry Ward Beecher


A morning without coffee is like sleep. ~Author Unknown


I believe humans get a lot done, not because we're smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee. ~Flash Rosenberg


As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold. ~Author Unknown


Mothers are those wonderful people who can get up in the morning before the smell of coffee. ~Author Unknown


Coffee is the best thing to douse the sunrise with. ~Terri Guillemets


Conscience keeps more people awake than coffee. ~Author Unknown


Way too much coffee. But if it weren't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever. ~David Letterman


Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. ~Author Unknown


Decaffeinated coffee is the devil's blend. ~Author Unknown


This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder. ~Honore de Balzac, "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"


Decaffeinated coffee is kind of like kissing your sister. ~Bob Irwin


I bought a decaffeinated coffee table, you can't even see a difference. ~Author Unknown


Decaf? No, it's dangerous to dilute my caffeine stream. ~Author Unknown


Chocolate, men, coffee - some things are better rich. ~Author Unknown


Coffee has two virtues: it is wet and warm. ~Dutch Proverb


Coffee, the finest organic suspension ever devised. ~Star Trek: Voyager


Petroleum and coffee had no value a few centuries ago. ~Author Unknown


He was my cream, and I was his coffee -
And when you poured us together, it was something.
~Josephine Baker


I've just arrived in New York City. What a place! Just smell those skyscrapers. Had breakfast at a little deli on Ninth Avenue. Cheese Danish and a cup of coffee, black as a moonless night. Hit the spot. ~From the television show Twin Peaksby David Lynch (Thanks, Rachel)


Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank. ~Alphonse Allais


Coffee smells like freshly ground heaven. ~Jessi Lane Adams


Caffeine isn't a drug, it's a vitamin! ~Author Unknown


Deja Brew: The feeling that you've had this coffee before. ~Author Unknown


There's nothing sweeter than a cup of bitter coffee. ~Rian Aditia


I orchestrate my mornings to the tune of coffee. ~Terri Guillemets


Forever: Time it takes to brew the first pot of coffee in the morning. ~Author Unknown


A fig for partridges and quails,
ye dainties I know nothing of ye;
But on the highest mount in Wales
Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.
~Jonathon Swift


Don't drink coffee in the morning. It will keep you awake until noon. ~Author Unknown


Coffee, which makes the politicians wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.
~Alexander Pope


Be a coffee-drinking individual - espresso yourself! ~Author Unknown

I make serious coffee - so strong it wakes up the neighbors. ~Author Unknown


Suave molecules of Mocha stir up your blood, without causing excess heat; the organ of thought receives from it a feeling of sympathy; work becomes easier and you will sit down without distress to your principal repast which will restore your body and afford you a calm, delicious night. ~Prince Tallyrand


In America you can buy bucket-sized cups of coffee in any flavour you like other than coffee-flavour. ~Author Unknown


Coffee in styrofoam is against my religion. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon,www.wildthymecreative.com


All's fair in love and war - and coffee. ~Pam Brady, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone,South Park, "Gnomes," original airdate Dec 16, 1998


You know you've been playing too much Nethack when you refer to coffee as a potion of sleep resistance. ~Sweeney Todd Lundgren


I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon. ~Ronald Reagan


Man does not live by coffee alone. Have a danish. ~Author Unknown


Coffee, n. break fluid. ~Author Unknown


This coffee tastes like mud! Well, it was ground this morning. ~Old Vaudeville joke


I like my coffee strong, not lethal! ~M*A*S*H


I don't have a problem with caffeine. I have a problem without caffeine! ~Author Unknown


Behind every successful woman is a substantial amount of coffee. ~Stephanie Piro


C:\COFFEE.POT missing (A)bort (R)etry (F)all asleep? ~Author Unknown


If it ain't caffeinated, it ain't coffee! ~Author Unknown


Coffee and tobacco are complete repose. ~Turkish Proverb


I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee. ~Carly Simon


In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running. ~Jeff Bezos


Herbal tea tastes so much better when it's coffee. ~Author Unknown


Black as the devil, Hot as hell,
Pure as an angel, Sweet as love.
~Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord


Coffee in England is just toasted milk. ~Author Unknown


Ultimate office automation - networked coffee machines. ~Author Unknown


Everybody should believe in something. I believe I'll have another coffee. ~Author Unknown


Decaf is like masturbating with an oven mitt! ~Robin Williams


Coffee is not my cup of tea. ~Author Unknown


Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.
It maketh me to wake in green pastures:
It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.
It restoreth my buzz:
It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction,
I will fear no Equal™:
For thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.
Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of The Starbucks:
Thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.
Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the House of Mochas forever.
~Author Unknown


C:>COFFEE.COM error. Contact programmer J. Valdez. ~Author Unknown


Coffee: The first peripheral! ~Author Unknown


I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. ~T.S. Eliot


Hot coffee and cold winter mornings are two of the best soul mates who ever did find each other. ~Terri Guillemets


Actually, this seems to be the basic need of the human heart in nearly every great crisis - a good hot cup of coffee. ~Alexander King


Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water. ~The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674


A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all. ~Henry Ward Beecher


Coffee makes me invincible. But when the cup is empty, I return to mere mortal. ~Terri Guillemets


It's amazing how the world begins to change through the eyes of a cup of coffee! ~Donna A. Favors


I like my coffee like my women: hot, strong, steamy. ~Author Unknown


Retirement is one great big giant coffee break. ~Author Unknown


My blood type is Folgers. ~Author Unknown


All the coffee in Columbia won't make me a morning person. ~Author Unknown


Do I like my coffee black? There are other colors? ~Author Unknown


I don't understand decaf, it's like sex without the sex. ~A.C. Van Cherub


Nothing is sad on a beautiful morning save to look down and realize you just had the last sip of coffee and the mug sits indifferently empty. ~Terri Guillemets


Don't laugh at the coffee. Some day you, too, may be old and weak. ~Author Unknown


It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity. I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts. I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles. ~Dave Barry


COFFEE.SYS Not Found: User startup disabled. ~Author Unknown


Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical. ~Jonathan Swift


I'd stop drinking coffee, but I'm no quitter. ~Author Unknown


The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself. ~Mark Helprin,Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995


RISING.SUN detected: (A)nother coffee, (C)old shower, (S)leep? ~Author Unknown


A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~Paul Erdos


Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat. ~Alex Levine


I'll quit coffee. It won't be easy drinking my Bailey's straight, but I'll get used to it. It'll still be the best part of waking up. ~From the television show Will and Grace


Caffeine Allocation Error: COFFEE.SYS missing, Programmer halted. ~Author Unknown


if(pot.coffee=EMPTY) {programmer->;brain=OFF}; ~Author Unknown


Docs? Oh, you mean the stuff you wipe up coffee with? ~Author Unknown


Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


Given enough coffee, I could rule the world. ~Author Unknown


I think if I were a woman I'd wear coffee as a perfume. ~John Van Druten


Ah well, a morning with weak coffee is still beaucoup better than a morning with no coffee. ~Terri Guillemets

Quotations about Clothing

The finest clothing made is a person's skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this. ~Mark Twain


Unmentionables - those articles of ladies' apparel that are never discussed in public, except in full-page, illustrated ads. ~Changing Times


A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together. ~James H. Boren


I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch. ~Gilda Radner


If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.... It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it. ~Albert Einstein


People seldom notice old clothes if you wear a big smile. ~Lee Mildon


It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. ~Henry David Thoreau


When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. ~Lois McMaster Bujold


Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ~Henry David Thoreau


I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes. ~Robert A. Heinlein


Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. ~Henry David Thoreau,Walden


Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
~Juvenal


If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck? ~Linda Ellerbee


I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking. ~Lin Yutang


A man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined. ~Anne Petry


I talk to him when I'm lonesome like; and I'm sure he understands. When he looks at me so attentively, and gently licks my hands; then he rubs his nose on my tailored clothes, but I never say naught thereat. For the good Lord knows I can buy more clothes, but never a friend like that. ~W. Dayton Wedgefarth


Just around the corner in every woman's mind - is a lovely dress, a wonderful suit, or entire costume which will make an enchanting new creature of her. ~Wilhela Cushman


A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you. ~Françoise Sagan


Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that. ~Charles Dickens


When in doubt, wear red. ~Bill Blass


Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


What a strange power there is in clothing. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society. ~Mark Twain, quoted in More Maxims of Mark compiled by Merle Johnson, 1927 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. ~Virginia Woolf


A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time. ~Laurence Sterne


Shopping tip: You can get shoes for 85 cents at the bowling alley. ~Author Unknown


O what a sight were Man, if his attires
Did alter with his minde;
And like a dolphins skinne, his clothes combin'd
With his desires!
~George Herbert


Every time a woman leaves off something she looks better, but every time a man leaves off something he looks worse. ~Will Rogers


Remember that always dressing in understated good taste is the same as playing dead. ~Susan Catherine


Funny that a pair of really nice shoes make us feel good in our heads - at the extreme opposite end of our bodies. ~Levende Waters


The only man who really needs a tail coat is a man with a hole in his trousers. ~John Taylor


Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on? ~P.G. Wodehouse


I simply can't understand
Why swimsuits are in such demand
They're soggy and damp,
Bind like a clamp,
And hold about three pounds of sand!
~D.R. Benson


Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear! ~Herman Melville


What do nudists wear on casual Fridays? ~Author Unknown


Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul. ~Quentin Bell


Stretch pants - the garment that made skiing a spectator sport. ~Author Unknown


Why is it considered seductive for women to wear beautiful clothes? Wouldn't it make more sense to wear something so ugly that a guy couldn't wait to take it off you? ~Flash Rosenberg


As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. ~John Ruskin


I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims


Where's the man could ease a heart
Like a satin gown?
~Dorothy Parker, "The Satin Dress"


Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat. ~Sydney J. Harris


The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. ~Thomas Carlyle


The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines. It must accompany its wearer and when a woman smiles the dress must smile with her. ~Madeleine Vionnet


You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one. ~Carolyn Kenmore


Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. ~Jane Austen

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins? ~George Bernard Shaw


Every uniform corrupts one's character. ~Max Frisch


After all there is something about a wedding-gown prettier than in any other gown in the world. ~Douglas William Jerrold


Fashion is like the id. It makes you desire things you shouldn't. ~Bob Morris


It's always the badly dressed people who are the most interesting. ~Jean Paul Gaultier


Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible. ~James Laver, Style in Costume


She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak. ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973


On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ~Elizabeth Bowen


For your own sake you should give her a new gown; for variety of dresses rouses desire, and makes an old mistress seem every day a new one. ~William Wycherley


Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly. ~Epictetus


High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead. ~Christopher Morley


I don't know who invented the high heel, but all men owe him a lot. ~Marilyn Monroe


Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls;
Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;
Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;
Dresses in which to do nothing at all;
Dresses for Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"


One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. ~Oscar Wilde


Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters. ~Anne Hollander


When I free my body from its clothes, from all their buttons, belts, and laces, it seems to me that my soul takes a deeper, freer breath. ~August Strindberg


Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions. ~CoCo Chanel


It's not what you wear - it's how you take it off. ~Author Unknown


Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important. ~Janet Lane


Fashion Law: If the shoe fits, it's ugly. ~Author Unknown


Like every good man, I strive for perfection, and, like every ordinary man, I have found that perfection is out of reach - but not the perfect suit. ~Edward Tivnan


Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly. ~Ambrose Bierce


Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart. ~Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel


Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone. ~Georg Simmel


Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. ~Quentin Crisp


To be a fashionable woman is to know yourself, know what you represent, and know what works for you. To be "in fashion" could be a disaster on 90 percent of women. You are not a page out of Vogue. ~Author Unknown


The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.
~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias


If I were a cat, what would make me purr? A pair of really comfortable blue jeans, and massages. ~Cinnamon Stomberger


Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding. ~Philip Dormer Stanhope


His clothes fit him so ill, and constrain him so much, that he seems rather their prisoner than their proprietor. ~Philip Dormer Stanhope


If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? ~Source Unknown


She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies. ~Mavis Gallant


Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women. ~Elsa Schiaparelli


No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit. ~Frederick G. Banting


There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress. ~Joseph Addison


Your Business clothes are naturally attracted to staining liquids. This attraction is strongest just before an important meeting. ~Scott Adams


I have always dressed according to certain Basic Guy Fashion Rules, Including: Both of your socks should always be the same color, Or they should at least both be fairly dark. ~Dave Barry


But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare,
When at the same moment she had on a dress
Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less,
And jewelry worth tem times more, I should guess,
That he had not a thing in the wide world to wear!
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"


If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater. ~Pam Brown


Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress. ~William Hazlitt, On the Clerical Character, 1819


A nudist is simply a human being without artificial additives. ~Author Unknown


If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime; but if clothing be your honor, it will soon be worn threadbare. ~William Arnot


I love America, and I love American women. But there is one thing that deeply shocks me - American closets. I cannot believe one can dress well when you have so much. ~Andrée Putman


Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul. ~Mark Twain


A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. ~Elizabeth Wilson


Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess. ~Edna Woolman Chase


The best-dressed woman is one whose clothes wouldn't look too strange in the country. ~Hardy Amies


A skirt is no obstacle to extemporaneous sex, but it is physically impossible to make love to a girl while she is wearing trousers. ~Helen Lawrenson


Did you hear about the Scottish drag queen? He wore pants. ~Lynn Lavner


Brevity is the soul of lingerie. ~Dorothy Parker


Clothes therefore, must be truly a badge of greatness; the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things. ~Edgar Rice Burroughs


Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse? ~Roland Barthes


On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary. ~Scott Adams, "Dilbert"


Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide. ~Honoré de Balzac


He who sleeps in the raw, is in for a nude awakening. ~Author Unknown


The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off. ~Jean Cocteau


All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress. ~Lin Yutang


I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes. ~Yves Saint Laurent


I want to die with my blue jeans on. ~Andy Warhol


You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word. ~Elizabeth Bibesco


Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. ~Mason Cooley


What a man most enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them. ~Brendan Francis


Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something. ~James Laver


Those hot pants of hers were so damned tight, I could hardly breathe. ~Benny Hill


If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater... suggest that he wear a tail. ~Fran Lebowitz


Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked." ~Molly Ivins


The truly fashionable are beyond fashion. ~Cecil Beaton


Never wear anything that panics the cat. ~P.J. O'Rourke


No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink. ~Murray Banks

Quotations about Civilization

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. ~Sigmund Freud


Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't. ~Lord Raglan


We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. ~Syrus


We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. ~Bryan White


Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long... ~Ogden Nash, "Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours," New Yorker, 1959 April 4 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole ofquoteinvestigator.com!)


Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. ~C.P. Snow


Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. ~Confucius


Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. ~Author and exact wording unknown, I've been told this was quoted by Paul Harvey


I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite. ~Bertrand Russell


We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ~Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man


And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~T.S. Eliot


We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. ~Albert Einstein


When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. ~Lois McMaster Bujold


K is for "Kenghis Khan." He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere. ~Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet


Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934


Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7


Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,Journal, 3 September 1855


Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. ~Richard P. Feynman


Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley


Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills. ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769


Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings]
Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 2 March 1861


[M]odern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics. ~Author unknown, "A Short History of Breakfast," from a Jack in the Box tray liner, 2006


What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. ~Henry Havelock Ellis


Civilization begins with soap. ~Galveston Times, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren


A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. ~Martin H. Fischer


One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897


Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions. ~Author Unknown


The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871


Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. ~B.F.Skinner


[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea. ~Edgar Saltus, The Philosophy of Disenchantment


When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. ~Daniel Webster, Remarks on Agriculture


Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History


They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow....
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969


Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. ~Mark Twain, quoted in More Maxims of Mark compiled by Merle Johnson, 1927


Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel


It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents


Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, "There's a naked person outside!" ~Mike Nichols


It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. ~Alfred North Whitehead


Civilization is what makes you sick. ~Paul Gauguin


The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties. ~Carol Matthau


The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. ~Richard Bach


Where there are humans
you'll find flies,
and Buddhas.
~Issa


Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. ~Arnold Toynbee


We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. ~James Ramsey Ullman


Flowers don't open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous;
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous.
~Terri Guillemets


Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup. ~Bennett Cerf


Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. ~Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva


If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. ~Stanley Garn


I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing:
And I said, "O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?"
~Alfred Tennyson


Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism. ~John M. Shanahan, The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less)


Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta. ~Brian Aldiss


Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love. ~Richard Bach

Quotations about Civil Disobedience

Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence. ~Juvenal


Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. ~Chinese Proverb


Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. ~Albert Einstein


No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime. ~Hermann Keyserling


When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders. ~Veterans Fast for Life


It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. ~Voltaire


If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849


You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. ~Malcolm X


Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason. ~Erich Fromm,Psychoanalysis and Religion


Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. ~Mark Twain


Integrity has no need of rules. ~Albert Camus


If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. ~Louis D. Brandeis


Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool. ~John J. Miller, And Hope to Die


Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists


Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." ~Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963


We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them. ~Alexander Bickel


It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911


I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. ~Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849


As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. ~Clarence Darrow


It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. ~Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775


I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. ~Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress


Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., March 22, 1956


If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu


It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Quotations about Cities

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks. ~Philip G. Hamerton


All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim. ~Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins


Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.
~John Milton


What is the city but the people? ~William Shakespeare


No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. ~Cyril Connolly


Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. ~Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo


Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities. ~Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica


The roaring street is hung for miles
With fierce electric fire.
~William Vaughan Moody, In New York


There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self. ~Ben Hecht


Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
~William Wordsworth


God made the country, and man made the town. ~William Cowper, The Task, 1785


A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. ~Herbert Prochnow


I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighbourhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


The city disappears street by street as you enter it. ~Ian Seed


Don't let the city steal your soul. ~Terri Guillemets


To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV


Cities are the abyss of the human species. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile


In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ~Somerset Maugham


In Rome you long for the country; in the country - oh inconstant! - you praise the distant city to the stars. ~Horace, Satires

Quotations About Cinema, Acting, Theater

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. ~Roman Polanski


Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing. ~Ralph Richardson


Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. ~Alfred Hitchcock


Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. ~John LeCarre


The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. ~Alfred Hitchcock


A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it. ~Alfred Hitchcock


A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself. ~Don Marquis


Never judge a book by its movie. ~J.W. Eagan


I've spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience. ~Wilson Mizner


Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West


Most horror movies are certainly that. ~Brendan Francis


You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older. ~Lillian Gish


What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out. ~Agnes Repplier


What I've learned is that life is too short and movies are too long. ~Denis Leary


There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy. ~Goldie Hawn


Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on. ~River Phoenix


Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing? ~Samuel Goldwyn


Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you've got is the dough. ~Louis de Bernières


The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won't walk backwards. A horror fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll step on the cat. ~Aaron Allston


It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around. ~Mary Pickford


A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good. ~T.S. Eliot, New York Post, 22 September 1963


Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Rated G is nobody gets the girl. PG is the good guy gets the girl. R is the bad guy gets the girl. XXX is everybody gets the girl. ~Author Unknown


[M]ovie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall. ~John Boorman, Money into Light, 1985


There's no thief like a bad movie. ~Sam Ewing


If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches. ~Norman McLaren

Quotations about Childhood

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again. ~Elizabeth Lawrence


Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. ~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells


Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"


Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860


Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons. ~Author Unknown


Childhood is a promise that is never kept. ~Ken Hill


Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. ~Katherine Anne Porter


There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. ~Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (thanks Harold)


When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood. ~Sam Ewing


In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in. ~Robert Brault,www.robertbrault.com


The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
~Christopher Morley, To a Child


Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected? ~Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin


If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. ~Tom Stoppard


I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.
~Lewis Carroll, "Solitude"


It is never too late to have a happy childhood. ~Tom Robbins


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. ~Cynthia Ozick


The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
~John Milton, Paradise Regained


To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Childhood is a short season. ~Helen Hayes


I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees. ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898


In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at.... ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898


I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. ~Bill Bryson


He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast. ~Herbert Gold


All any child needs is the protection of loving parents and an alternative source of information. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. ~Mark Twain


Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath. ~Author Unknown


This, too, is why our life in childhood is so full of infinite significance. Then, all is of equal importance to us; we hear all, we see all, all impressions affect us equally; while, when more advanced in years, we act with more definite ends, busy ourselves more exclusively with details, and laboriously exchange the pure gold of intuition for the paper-money of book definitions, and our lives gain in breadth what they lose in depth and intensity. Now we are grown-up and people of consequence, we are always getting into new houses.... Even our clothes are strange to us, we hardly know how many buttons has the very coat on our back. ~Heinrich Heine, "A Tour in the Harz" (1824), Travel-Pictures, translated from German


The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give. ~Ellen Glasgow


The world knows how to straighten out a spoiled child but never makes it up to a child deprived. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes. ~Malcolm de Chazal

Quotations about Cheerleading

Simply because we do not run across goal lines, slam dunk basketballs, or hit home runs, doesn't mean we can't change the score. ~Author Unknown


A good cheerleader is not measured by the height of her jumps but by the span of her spirit. ~Author Unknown


I'm not a cheerleader. I'm an athletic supporter. ~Author Unknown


Players: A vital part of any sporting event, they entertain the crowd in the intervals between timeouts so the cheerleaders can take a well-earned break. ~Author Unknown


In any other sport, if you miss the catch all you lose is the ball. ~Author Unknown


Any man can hold a girl's hand, but only the elite can hold her feet. ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders are simply a jump above the rest. ~Author Unknown


If cheerleading got any easier, it would be called football. ~Author Unknown


There is no halftime for cheerleaders! ~Author Unknown


The referees have always been blind, it's our job to make them deaf. ~Author Unknown


If cheerleaders are so easy, why aren't you with one? ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders know that pyramids were not built in Egypt. ~Author Unknown


You know you're a cheerleader when you have to yell, kick, and scream to get what you want. ~Author Unknown


Flying is the second best thrill to cheerleaders; being caught is the first. ~Author Unknown


I trade sweat for strength. I trade doubt for belief. I trade cheerleading for nothing. ~Author Unknown


There is only one way to cheer - hard! ~Author Unknown


One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured. ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders are angels - we're the only humans who can fly. ~Author Unknown


Cheerleading is more than a sport; it's an attitude. ~Author Unknown


I don't play the field - I rule the sidelines. ~Author Unknown


Wimps lift weights, cheerleaders lift people. ~Author Unknown


It's hard to be humble when you can jump, stunt, and tumble! ~Author Unknown

Quotations about Charm

"Charm" - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm. ~Havelock Ellis


Charm is... a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956


Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. ~Oliver Herford


Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves. ~Henri Frédéric Amiel


All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. ~Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise


Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. ~James Matthew Barrie, What Every Woman Knows, about charm


There is a sort of charm in ugliness, if the person has some redeeming qualities and is only ugly enough. ~Josh Billings


It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. ~Oscar Wilde


Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others. ~John Mason Brown


Charisma is a fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament. ~Henry Van Dyke


Forbidden things have a secret charm. ~Publius Cornelius Tacitus


There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me. ~John Erskine

Quotations about Change

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. ~Harold Wilson


If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it. ~Mary Engelbreit


It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. ~W. Edwards Deming (Thanks, Michelle)


All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France


When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ~Victor Frankl


Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer. ~Shunryu Suzuki


The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. ~Henry Miller


You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler. ~Denis Waitley


Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher


If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change. ~John A. Simone, Sr.


There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place. ~Washington Irving


When you are through changing, you are through. ~Bruce Barton


Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. ~John Kenneth Galbraith


What can we take on trust
in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness,
pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps.
~Euripides, Hecuba


They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. ~Confucius


Change always comes bearing gifts. ~Price Pritchett


The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. ~Ellen Glasgow


Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril. ~Laurens van der Post


Growth is the only evidence of life. ~John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, 1864


Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. ~Irene Peter


Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. ~Faith Baldwin


The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one. ~William H. Seward


The birds are molting. If only man could molt also - his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions. ~James Allen


The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. ~William Blake


Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"


You can avoid having ulcers by adapting to the situation: If you fall in the mud puddle, check your pockets for fish. ~Author Unknown


Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. ~Marcel Proust


Stubbornness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow. ~Glen Beaman


If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies. ~Author Unknown

I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed. ~George Carlin


We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves. ~Lynn Hall


It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Charles Darwin


Change may come to you in trinkets and I hope it adorns your life gracefully. ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. ~Henri Bergson


The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down. ~Jawaharlal Nehru


We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
~W.H. Auden


What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history. ~Joan Wallach Scott


You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. ~Ellen Glasgow


Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! ~Andre Gide


If you want to make enemies, try to change something. ~Woodrow Wilson


After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over. ~Alfred Edward Perlman, New York Times, 3 July 1958


Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights. ~Pauline R. Kezer


If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing. ~Saint Augustine


We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it. ~John Steinbeck, America and Americans


A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. ~John Ciardi


The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists. ~Japanese Proverb


The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still. ~Laurence J. Peter


Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight. ~Ezra Pound


Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing. ~Paul Valery


It's the most unhappy people who most fear change. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


People don't change. Only their costumes do. ~Gene Moore


God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me. ~Author Unknown


We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance. ~Harrison Ford


Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times. ~Michel Montaigne


If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. ~Kurt Lewin


Every single thing changes and is changing always in this world. Yet with the same light the moon goes on shining. ~Saigyo


Things do not change; we change. ~Henry David Thoreau


Our only security is our ability to change. ~John Lilly


Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. ~Bertold Brecht


He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. ~Francis Bacon, "On Innovation," Essays, 1597


Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly. ~Francis Bacon


A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar. ~Confucius, Analects


Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in the barometer, indicate nothing but the changeableness of the weather. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet. ~Stanislaw Lec


The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. ~George Bernard Shaw