Quotes:S-Z

From Ben's Writing

Contents 1 Santa Claus 2 William Safire 3 Carl Sagan 4 Jean-Paul Sartre 5 Seneca 6 George Bernard Shaw 7 William Shakespeare 8 Olin Shivers 9 Robert Louis Stevenson 10 Tom Stoppard 11 Dr. Seuss 12 Jonathan Swift 13 Tacitus 14 Mother Teresa 15 J.R.R.Tolkien 16 Mark Twain 17 Paul Valery 18 Voltaire 19 Kurt Vonnegut 20 Lil Wayne 21 WILPF 22 Kanye West 23 Oscar Wilde

Santa Claus

• "I'm trying to get this obesity shit together because you know what doesn't squeeze down a chimney well? Type 2 diabetes."

William Safire

• "The right to do something doesn't mean that doing it is right."

Carl Sagan

• "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science."
• ‎"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
• “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Full name: Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre

• "Hell is other people."

Seneca

• "Religion is considered by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

George Bernard Shaw

• "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
• "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

William Shakespeare

• "Poor and content is rich, and rich enough."

Olin Shivers

• "I object to doing things that computers can do."
• "I tend to look for weak, uncertain students and feed off of their insecurities; by preying on their poor self-images, I manage to temporarily assuage my own feelings of inadequacy and failure. I've also found undergraduate advising to be a terrific vehicle for venting a lot of my own pent-up rage and frustration." [From a uncensored version of his bio published by MIT's undergraduate office]

Robert Louis Stevenson

Born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson

• "Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity."

Tom Stoppard

• "The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means." [Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead]

Dr. Seuss

Full name: Theodor Seuss Geisel

• "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

Jonathan Swift

• "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

Tacitus

Full name: Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

• "They made a wasteland and called it peace."

Mother Teresa

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

• "The silence and the emptiness is so great—  that I look and do not see—  I listen and I do not hear." [Taken from private letters to friends, superiors and confessors; Gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk]

J.R.R.Tolkien

• "Not all those that wander are lost."

Mark Twain

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens; Mark Twain was his pen name.

• "It's not what we don't know that hurts us; It's that we know so much that ain't true."

Paul Valery

• "A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas."

Voltaire

Born François-Marie Arouet

• "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
• "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
• "All men [sic] are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God."
• "Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."
• "Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause."
• "Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."
• "He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."
• "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it."

Kurt Vonnegut

• "New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."
• "When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life. Old age is more like a semicolon."
• "All men are not created equal. It is the purpose of the Government to make them so."

Lil Wayne

Born Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.

• "Be good, or be good at it." [Presumably alluding to criminal acts.]
• "I think about more than I forget."

WILPF

Expanded: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

• "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate Personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." [Jan Edwards and Molly Morgan]

Kanye West

Full name: Kanye Omari West

• "If you admire somebody, you should go ahead [and] tell [them]; People never get the flowers while they can still smell them." (my emphasis) [Graduation, 2007]
• "Some people graduate, but we're still stupid; They tell you read this, eat this, don't look around." [Graduation, 2007]
• "George [W.] Bush doesn't care about black people." [Spoken while deviating from the prepared script during A Concert for Hurricane Relief, NBC, September 2, 2005]

Oscar Wilde

• "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passion a quotation." [Ironically—intentional or not—Wilde has created a bit of a paradox all here: we are all inextricably stuck as living mimicry and our passions are all embodied in a wide variety of quotations. If you are lucky enough, in his eyes, to live without mimicry or working passionately towards a quoted ideal, then you are part of the other group of people—the remaining part of the "Most" Wilde indirectly refers to in his quotation. But then you must, by definition, fall into the category of people he mocks: those who live their lives according to some quotation. These people, however, may do it even while unaware of it. What's interesting here, is that simple change—would eliminate the paradox—yet his choice leads us to a set of people, so to speak, who are not represented explicitly in this quotation, but rather are included implicitly and ever so subtly.]
• "Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much."
• "There is much to be said in favor [sic] of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
• "I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects."