Researching logical fallacies for class and found this gem: "The clinching proof of my reasoning is that I will cut anyone who argues further into dogmeat." -- Attributed to Sir Geoffery de Tourneville, ca 1350 A.D.
"The next time Ronald Reagan comes on TV, I want you to turn the sound down, set your child in front of it, point at that man and say 'If he ever offers you candy, or asks you to get into his car, or to go fight in Nicaragua, just say no'." Frank Zappa.
"The Thing", a movie about a group of people who don't even really like each other stuck together in a single, snowbound location trying to figure out who has a terrifying infection, counts as a Christmas movie this year. - Zack Budryk
I have a new fav in this area: "How many times do you get to lie before you are a liar?" -Michael Josephson
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. - Mitch Hedberg
Maybe quoted before, but worth quoting again: "Always do right. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest." --Mark Twain
You can't believe a word you see on our website. - rando Walmart employee when I asked for an item that the website said was in stock, but wasn't.
“I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.” ― Niccolo Machiavelli This quote is one of my favourites just because it's absolutely incorrect and somehow has 531 notes on Goodreads. It's an ironic one.
It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle. - Alexis de Tocqueville
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. ~ Mark Twain
If ye love wealth better than liberty,the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. - Samuel Adams, to the men who opposed the revolution because of its effect on their business dealings with Britain.
A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! ~Mark Twain
Excellent. Reminds me of this one: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins
"What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not." -Wolfgang Pauli
There is a difference between you and me. We both looked into the abyss, but when it looked back at us… you blinked. - Batman
Once upon a time: “To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.” "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." And my translation since I can't find this anywhere: "It seems like tolerance will soon reach to such a level so that the bright will be prohibited from thinking, because he's humiliating the feelings of the idiot." - Mikhail Bulgakov
Just read it. Nice, little story. A quote that's worthy of mentioning: "If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."