Quotations

with thanks to Shevonne for the quote! - Big Joe Silenced

"Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835. The man who provided us with some of the best quips ever is also one of the most misquoted men of all time. Here are 10 quotes Mark Twain likely never uttered, despite popular belief. 1. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” It has also been attributed to Agatha Christie. Neither source can be verified. He DID say: “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.” 2. “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” He DID say: “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.” 3. “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” He DID say: “When a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.” 4. “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He DID say: “I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.” 5. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” This was actually written by Blaise Pascal. He DID say: “We write frankly and fearlessly but then we "modify" before we print.” 6. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” He DID say: “Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.” 7. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Twain himself denied inventing this quote, and claimed Benjamin Disraeli was the one who created it. It is thanks to Twain, however, that the saying became popular in the U.S. He DID say: “Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.” 8. “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” He DID say: “[He] was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.” 9. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.” He DID say: “One cannot have everything the way he would like it. A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.” 10. “Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over.” He DID say: “Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual--and yet each continues to be an individual....here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed.”" - Son of Groucho

“Like the bird the poet of this lyric sings twice over so as to recapture the first moment, to bind his day together, to redeem the past from its pastness, to put futurity into the present." -- Robert Browning - Amira

Can crumble being a creature of time be an instant? - Todd Hoff

Common sense is just another phrase for unexamined prejudice :) - Victor Ganata

And very culturally dependent was the point of this sociologist :) - Eivind

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. // It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.” - Amira

"Forget your perfect offering..." http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Adriano

-- Bill Cosby in "Ghost Dad" - Big Joe Silenced

Groovy. - Greg GuitarBuster

anybody? cos i haven't been able to trace it. - Big Joe Silenced

"From the early 1650s a call to return to the basic principles of Islam had been preached by a fiery preacher, Mehmed Kadizade, whose followers were called kadizadelis. Kadizade condemned not only the non-Islamic consumption of wine, coffee and tobacco, but also the religious institutions in general and the dervish orders in particular. His slogan was: ‘Every innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to hell.’" - Eivind

A reaction to the Ottomans living it up, I guess. A contemporary European view of Islam: "[Joseph Pitton de Tournefort] believed Islam was the most seductive, and therefore the most dangerous, of all the false non-Christian religions, because it offered the same spiritual rewards as Christianity in the next world while allowing far more sensual pleasures in this one." - Eivind

"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. That's our problem." - Big Joe Silenced

-- Howard Zinn - Big Joe Silenced

still enjoying. - Big Joe Silenced

*pat pat* - Big Joe Silenced

That led into my favorite quote from the movie, where the old man tells him, "We will never bow to men such as you." And Loki says, "There are no men such as me." And the old man throws it back at him: "There are *always* men such as you." - Steven Perez

Are you disrespectin' my bro Plut?! - Eivind

I LOVE that quote -- and that guy! :) - LoisMarketing