User:Moonraker/Qu

• Index

• « La puissance ne consiste pas à frapper fort ou souvent, mais à frapper juste. »

Honoré de Balzac

• « C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute. »
• Worse than a crime, a blunder.

Talleyrand

• from Schleswig-Holstein Question

Lord Palmerston is reported to have said: "Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."

• "I sometimes feel like putting a message in a bottle and floating it down the Boyne : " I am alive. T. White. 1944. Is anybody else?""

T. H. White, ‎Letters to a Friend

• "A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: 'It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alters the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.' "

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

Politics

• "And in your muddy souls you can't see that the one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it."

G. K. Chesterton, from play Time's Abstract and Brief Chronicle

• "I worked for the Devil and he was a bore and a mediocrity. Although the methods and goals of Novosti are devilishly evil, its daily routine is so boring that it does not produce outrage. It simply debilitates."

Yuri Bezmenov (as Tomas Schuman), World Thought Police (1986)

• "Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s (and Britain’s) history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme."

Ron Unz, American Pravda Series

• "Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources."

Abba Eban

• "No doubts can exist in the herd; the bigger the crowd the better the truth – and the greater the catastrophe."

Carl Jung

• "Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

• "The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, but they keep lying to us and we keep pretending to believe them."

Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs: a Memoir (2011)

• "War is when your government tells you who your enemy is, revolution is when you figure it out yourself."

Makhno Boyce, Manifestations of Freedom

• "We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert."

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Encouragement of Science (1950)

• "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."

Michael Oakeshott, from "On Being Conservative" (1956)

Science

• The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Freeman Dyson

Success

• "It ain’t the things you don’t know what gets you in trouble. It’s the things you know that just ain’t so."

Will Rogers, attrib. to Mark Twain

• "I was not a good doctor, my studies had been too rapid, my hospital training too short, but there is not the slightest doubt that I was a successful doctor. What is the secret of success? To inspire confidence. What is confidence? I do not know, I only know that it cannot be acquired by book reading, nor by the bedside of our patients. It is a magic gift granted by birth-right to one man and denied to another. The doctor who possesses this gift can almost raise the dead."

Axel Munthe

• "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill'."

Duke of Wellington

Money

• "The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell."

John Templeton

• "I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol, and wild women. The other half I wasted."

W. C. Fields

Faërie

• "The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords."
• "Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories

• "People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind

Frasier (1993)

• Dr Frasier Crane: What do you do when the romance goes out of a relationship?
• Roz Doyle: I get dressed and go home.

• Frasier: Hello, Ethan. I'm listening.
• Ethan: Hi, Dr. Crane.
• Frasier: How old are you?
• Ethan: I'm thirteen.
• Frasier: Well, what can I do for you?
• Ethan: Well, I'm having a lot of problems with the other kids at school. They're always beating me up.
• Frasier: Why do you think that's so?
• Ethan: Probably because I'm smart. I have a 160 IQ. I'm in the astronomy club and I hate sports.
• Frasier: Well, you know, Ethan, the other children are just acting out of jealousy and immaturity, and I know it doesn't help much right now, but the day will come in the next few years when you will have the last laugh.
• Ethan: ...That's it?
• Frasier: Yes.
• Ethan: Frankly, Dr. Crane, I find that advice patronizing, simplistic and, in all candor, uninspired. The real surprise here is that they pay you to dole out this balloon juice.
• Frasier: Ethan, where are you calling from?
• Ethan: Home.
• Frasier: Well, if any of Ethan's classmates are listening, you know where he is, and he can't stay in there forever. Thank you for your call.

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/734806

Epitaphs

On a Tightrope Walker

Used no net
Showed no fear
Made a mis-step
And wound up here

James Alberry

He slept beneath the moon
He basked beneath the sun
He livd a life of going-to-do
And left with nothing done

In Poole Churchyard, on a tall man named Day

As long as long can be
So long so long was he
How long, how long, dost say?
As long as the longest Day

East Dalhousie,Nova Scotia

Here lies
Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good
Die Young

Ellen Shannon, Girard, Penn.

Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
By the explosion of a lamp
Filled with "R. E. Danforth's
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"

Samuel Brenton, Stockbridge, Mass.

Was suddenly killed at early dawn
July 4th, 1842
By the explosion of a small canon
Aged 15 years

Lincoln, Maine

He found a rope and picked it up
And with it walked away
It happened that to the other end
A horse was hitched, they say
They took the rope and tied it up
Unto a hickory limb
It happened that the other end
Was somehow hitched to him

Sir John Strange

Here lies an honest lawyer
And that is Strange

Ravlunda, Sweden

Here beneath rest the ashes of a man who was in the habit of always postponing everything till the day after. However, at last he improved and really died Jan. 31, 1972.

Julian Skaggs, West Virginia

I made an ash of myself

Messages to a wife

1890 The light of my life has gone out
1891 I have struck another match

Oxford, England

Here lies the body of Elred
At least he will when he is dead
But now at this time he's still alive
14th August '65

Untrustworthy

Here lies a man who while he lived
Was happy as a linnet
He always lied while on the earth
And now he's lying in it

Moultrie, Georgia

Here lies the father of 29
He would have had more
But he didn't have time

Belturbet, Ireland

Here lies the body
Of John Round
Lost at sea
And never found

Hartford, Conn.

Those who cared for him while living
Will know whose body is buried here
To others it does not matter.
September 1, 1882.

Aaron S. Burbank, Winsted, Conn.

Bury me not when I am dead
Lay me not down in a dusty bed
I could not bear the life down there
With earthworms crawling through my hair

Harwichport

Sacred to the remains of
Jonathan Thompson
A pious Christian and
Affectionate husband
His disconsolate widow
Continues to carry on
His grocery business
At the old stand on
Main Street: Cheapest
And best prices in town

A watchmaker's epitaph

Here lies in a horizontal position
The outside case of
George Routleigh, watchmaker,
Whose abilities in that line were an honour To his profession.
Integrity was the mainspring
And prudence the regulator
Of all the actions of his life.
Humane, generous and liberal,
His hand never stopped
Till he had relieved distress.
So nicely regulated were all his motions
That he never went wrong,
Except when set a-going
By people
Who did not know
His key.
Even then he was easily
Set right.
He had the art of disposing of his time
So well, that his hours glided away
In one continual round of pleasure and delight
Till an unlucky minute put a period to His existence.
He departed this life
November 14, 1802
Aged 57,
Wound up
In hope of being taken in hand
By his Maker
And of being thoroughly cleaned and repaired
and set a-going
In the world to come.

Tongue twisters

• «Un chasseur sachant chasser sait chasser sans son chien, et un chasseur sachant chasser sans son chien, ça se chasse aussi, sachez-le!»
• «Diderot dinait du dos d'un dodo dindon.»
• «Didon dîna dit-on de dix dos dodus de dix dodus dindons.»
• «Les chaussettes de l’archiduchesse, sont-elles sèches ? Archi-sèches.»
• «Cinq chiens chassent six chats.»
• «Ces cerises sont si sûres qu’on ne sait pas si c’en sont.»
• «Cinq gros rats grillent dans la grosse graisse grasse.»
• «Je veux et j’exige du jasmin et des jonquilles.»
• «Ces six saucissons secs sont si secs qu’on ne sait si c’en sont.»