Sayings & Quotes

[Lilith7]

'There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.'
Chinese proverb.

"To put it in is a sin.
To pull it out too soon is a crying shame. "
Mae West (I think).


"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana

"A fool tells what he will do
A boaster tells what he has done
A wise man does it and says nothing."
Anon

ÔÇ£Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper up-bringing, a sound moral code ....... and witnesses.ÔÇØ
Franklin P Jones

"Life is not holding a good hand; Life is playing a poor hand well."
Danish Proverb

[Lilith7]

"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilityÔÇÖs of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket".
Mrs Lintott in Alan Bennet's play The History Boys.

"Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes."
Henry David Thoreau

ÔÇ£Prejudices are what fools use for reason.ÔÇØ
Voltaire


"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. "
Simone de Beauvoir

[Lilith7]

"He aha te mea nui o te ao?
He tangata! He tangata! He tangata!"

"What is the most important thing in the world?
It is people! It is people! It is people!"

"Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou
ka ora ai te iwi "

"With your food basket and my food basket
the people will thrive "


"He waka eke noa"
"A canoe which we are all in with no exception"


"No reira,kia ora tatou.Kia hora te marino,kia whaka papa pounamu te moana,kia tere karohirohi."

"May calm be widespread, may the sea lie smooth as greenstone, may the warmth of summer fall upon us all.ÔÇØ

Maori proverbs.



"It's hard to soar with the eagles,
when you're surrounded by turkeys."
Anon

[Lilith7]

ÔÇ£Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.ÔÇØ
P J O'Rourke

"Spring in the Bronx

Der spring is sprung
Der grass is riz
I wonder where dem boidies is?

Der little boids is on der wing,
Ain't dat absoid?
Der little wings is on de boid!"
While frequently attributed to Ogden Nash or ee cummings, the author of this amusing nonsense - known as 'Spring In The Bronx' - is Anonymous.

'Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.'
Martin Luther King, Jr.


"Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."
Anon


"Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge at you because you are a vegetarian."
Shari R. Barr.

[Lilith7]

"So long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him -- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"
Laurence Sterne.

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant..."
Robert Louis Stevenson.

'You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who they think can do nothing for them.'
James D. Miles

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
Kurt Vonnegut.

[Lilith7]

"The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around. ÔÇ£
Herb Caen

"Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."
Jorge Luis Borges

"Sex at age ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope." George F. Burns

"Nostalgia is a seductive liar.." George W. Ball

"The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused....."
Shirley Maclaine.



"Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. It's battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions...for safety on the street, for childcare, for social welfare...for rape crisis centres, for women's refuges, reforms in law."
Anon

[Lilith7]

'There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound.'
Diana Cortes

"Women's Manifesto--- because women's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or reptetious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're **** and if we don't we're frigid and if we love a woman its because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and pushy and if we expect a child we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and because we still can't get an adequate contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and.....for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement. "
Anon

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein

'Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby.. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart.
She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit.'
Anon


A quote from Dr Samuel Johnson, written in the 16th century and still worth remembering today.
"What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco".
"And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."


"If at first you fail then destroy all evidence of your attempt."
Anon

"Friends are the family we choose for ourselves."
Anon


'Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder
Such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives being
embarrassed by our parents and the last part being
embarrassed by our children'
Ogden Nash

[Lilith7]

"Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends."
Ogden Nash

"Religion is like a penis:
Its fine to have one
Its fine to be proud of it
But please donÔÇÖt whip it out in public & start waving it around
Most of all - donÔÇÖt shove it where its not wanted!!"
Anon


"There's one advantage to being 102. There's no peer pressure."
DENNIS WOLFBERG

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. "
George Best


"Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order. "
David Gerrold

[Lilith7]

"Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the centre of the city."
Oscar Wilde


"Rugby is a game for the mentally deficient... That is why it was invented by the British. Who else but an Englishman could invent an oval ball?"
Peter Pook

"A good artist copies. A great artist steals"
Pablo Picasso

"Art is a lie which tells the truth."
Picasso

"Egotism - usually just a case of mistaken nonentity."
Barbara Stanwyck

"I've learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is a piece of cake."
Anon

"We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams."
Jeremy Irons

[Lilith7]

'The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.'
e e cummings

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."
Steve Jobs

'Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behaviour, it would all make sense.'
Sigmund Freud

'If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.'
Emerson M. Pugh

'Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill-will'
Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Lilith7]

ÔÇ£We need to promote greater tolerance and understanding among the peoples of the world. Nothing can be more dangerous to our efforts to build peace and development than a world divided along religious, ethnic or cultural lines. In each nation, and among all nations, we must work to promote unity based on our shared humanity.ÔÇØ
Kofi Annan


"Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak oneÔÇÖs soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood."
Josephine Baker

'It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.'
Pierre Bayle

'Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it. No destructive lies. No ridiculous fears. No debilitating anger. '
Bill Bradley


'In the globalized world that is ours, maybe we are moving towards a global village, but that global village brings in a lot of different people, a lot of different ideas, lots of different backgrounds, lots of different aspirations. I think respect and understanding will help that village function better than it does today. '
Lakhdar Brahimi

[Lilith7]

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these."
George Washington Carver

'How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance -- the one value that is indispensable in creating community.'
Barbara Jordan

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth"
Albert Einstein

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson


'Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.'
Mahatma Gandhi.


'The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.'
Lynn Lavner

[Lilith7]

"The structure of Management is much like a colony of monkeys climbing a tree. Since the best leaves are at the top of the tree the strongest and most devious get to the top first. The monkeys further down all want to be friendly with those at the top to get some of the best leaves so keep smiling up at them.

So in Management when a Manager looks down all he sees is smiling faces while those at the bottom looking up can only see assholes. And they, just like you & me, only get shit on!"
Anon

'We argue and debate with our hearts but vote with our pockets.'
old French saying.

'A hangover is the wrath of grapes.'
Anon


'As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.'
Bertrand Russell

[Lilith7]

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity."
Einstein


"You are saying our problem is civil disobedience, but that is not our problem.
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and all the while the Grand Thieves are running the country
ThatÔÇÖs Our Problem.! "
Howard Zinn


"The budget should be balanced,
the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt shoud be reduced,
the arrogance of officials should be tempered and controlled,
and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed -
lest Rome become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work , instead of living on public assistance."
Cicero - anno 55 Before Christ.



'If only closed minds came with closed mouths.'
Anon

[Lilith7]

'Politics comes from two Latin words.
Poli - meaning 'many'.
And tics - meaning 'blood sucking leeches'
Anon


"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves ÔÇô that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive ÔÇô are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky"



"Rather than respect or tolerate religion we must be free to investigate, analyse, challenge, criticise, debate, satirise, lampoon, ridicule and mock any and all religious belief. We need to continue this until everyone that has the intellect to comprehend sees religion as the superstitious and dangerous nonsense that it is.
We need to expose the terror that religion has evoked throughout history and that is poisoning our world once again, especially by Muslim terrorists, but also barbaric acts by Christians, Jews, Hindus and even Buddhists. We can't let our inquiry into these atrocities or even our curiosity about some silly religious claim like the virgin birth be stopped in its tracks by their demand to back off: 'Respect our religion'.
-by John Ateo and Jason C.


'Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.'
Michael Palin

[Lilith7]

'Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake 'messiah'.'
Richard Bach


'The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.'
Friedrich Nietzsche


'The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. '
Thomas Stephen Szasz

'If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.'
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

"People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love."
Claude Monet - born on November 14, 1840, died 1926

[Lilith7]

'Arrogance diminishes wisdom.'
Arab proverb

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
e.e. cummings

'The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.'
John F. Kennedy


'By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.'
Confucius

[Lilith7]

"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful."
Marie Curie

'In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.'
Nancy Astor

'Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.'
Charlotte Bronte




'Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.' ~

Eleanor Rooseveldt

[Lilith7]

ÔÇ£We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.ÔÇØ
Martin Luther King

"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--and yet it is the most precious thing we have." Albert Einstei



"DonÔÇÖt speak to me about your religion; first show it to me in how you treat other people. Don't tell me how much you love your God; show me in how much you love all his children. Don't preach to me your passion for your faith; teach me through your compassion for your neighboursÔÇÖ. In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as I am in how you choose to live and give"....Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey



"Detritus's intelligence wasn't too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line dancer".
Terry Prachett

" I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself."
-Marlene Dietrich


Let the people who think that life is a race get to the end ahead of you.
~Anon

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous;
Anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."
Vaclav Havel.

"The more one matures, the younger one grows. There are many people who as they age become increasingly vigorous and energetic, more broad-minded and tolerant, living with a greater sense of freedom and assurance. It is important to remember that ageing and growing old are not necessarily the same."
Herman Hesse


Bumper Sticker of the Month
He is YOUR God, they are YOUR rules ... YOU burn in hell!

[Lilith7]

'The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your 'knowledge'.'
Elbert Hubbard

ÔÇ£Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.ÔÇØ
Yiddish Proverb


'We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. '
-Dr. Seuss


'My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards
the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their
own image to be servants of their human interests.'
George Santayana


'The notion that faith in christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'
Robert Green Ingersoll