Words, Words, Words

I keep a file on my computer labeled “Quotations,” which consists of various clippings I’ve picked up along the way. Every once in a long while I like to re-read them, so here’s the latest installment.

As you get older the positive association of receiving socks as a gift steadily increases. It goes from cruel insult to thoughtful token to thing you are genuinely excited about—Murtaza M. Hussain

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”—Andy Warhol

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”–Martin Luther King

Marine Biologist: “Save the whales!”
No one: “All marine life matters!” —Random Twitter Feed

When you can’t create, you can work.—Henry Miller

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”―Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”—Eugene Debs

‘It’s not about hope. You don’t do what you do because you hope things will get better. It’s about getting up every morning and asking yourself what’s the right thing to do and doing it.”—Allen Ginsberg

“The problem is not that the world is too full of fools; it’s that lightning is improperly distributed.”—Mark Twain

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

“The definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t.”—Anonymous

Hofstadter’s Law: “The time and effort required to complete a project are always more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Quote Tag

Masercot of the very funny humor blog Potatoes and The Promise of More Potatoes has tagged me to play the blog game “Quote Tag.” The way it works is this: a blogger nominates from three to six other bloggers; then each blogger has to name a 19th-century author and provide three to nine quotes from that author. In order to keep the game going, each blogger subsequently nominates three to six other bloggers.

I’m going to cheat a little by picking George Bernard Shaw as my choice of author.  His 94-year-old vegetarian life spanned across the 19th and 20th centuries—see that’s what happens when your diet is based on kale smoothies. The great thing about Shaw is that practically everything he ever wrote or said is quotable, so for lazy me, it’s an easy post.

So here we go:

1. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

2. “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”

3. “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

4. “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”

5. “My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.”

6. “Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!”

7. “In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”

8. “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

And here are the names of  some bloggers for whom I’d like to pass the game onto (and whose blogs you may very well enjoy visiting):

Learn Fun Facts: Edmark Law’s daily blog of historical, mathematical, and lexical facts

Every Day Another Story: Homespun folk music and stories

McPhillamyActorBlog: Actor Colin Mcphillamy’s blog about his life in the theater