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- Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
- Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, "Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin."
- Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy
- Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
- Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar....He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
- Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972)
- Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
- Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.
- George Eliot (1819 - 1880), from "Daniel Deronda"
- A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?
And he answered: It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness. And that is Fate? said the priest. Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master. That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too. - Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
- So little time, so little to do.
- Oscar Levant (1906 - 1972)
- We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
- Wernher von Braun commenting on bureaucracy
- The phrase "we (I) (you) simply must..." designates something that need not be done. "That goes without saying" is a red warning. "Of course" means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers.
- Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
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