Quotations Weblog

One well-defined trait of the human race is that we like to divide each other up into opposite categories: good or bad, friend or enemy, young or old, wise or foolish. Perhaps that’s why there are so many quotations that begin with the words “There are two kinds of people”:

While these kinds of generalizations are fun and a great way to make a point, the reality is that there are millions of kinds of people, and it’s wise to remember that people just might be more than the category you’ve assigned them to. Robert Benchley has the final word on this topic:

This slogan for Utah is part of an entertaining entry in Diesel Sweeties’ collection of comics. I read this comic every morning. I wake up somewhere between four a.m. and five a.m., stagger into the living room and load up my email and the comics that I read every morning. I also check the Motivational Quotes of the Day to check for typos.

• Diesel Sweeties – Fifty States, Fifty Slogans

Ironically, on the same day this comic showed up on my computer screen, this quote was posted on the Motivational Quotes of the Day. Our quotations are chosen randomly every morning, so it was a quirky bit of kismet that made me strangely happy.

Sure, that was easy for Thomas Fuller. He didn’t have fifty new slogans to learn…

Continuing the my favorite quotations series, here are some of my favorite quotations from H. L. Mencken.

Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 12, 1880, 125 years ago today. Mencken was a journalist, writer, social critic, and cynic, and one of my favorite people to quote. Wikipedia has a good biography of Mencken if you’d like to learn more.

As always, it’s hard to choose favorites from someone who wrote so much and with such an inimitable style. See our complete list of H. L. Mencken quotations for more.

I’m working on some major updates to The Quotations Page. In the meantime, we continue to add quotations. We now have a total of 23,496 quotations by 2713 authors.

We’ve also added some new subjects to our index recently:

• Weather
• Questioning
• Photography
• Painting
• Crime
• Nobility

Here are some of the quotations added in the last week or two.

There is a lot of finger pointing going on. I’ve seen fingers pointed at the politicians in office that voted to forego the levee repair and strengthening. I’ve seen fingers pointed at President Bush for his apparent lack of empathy. I’ve seen fingers pointed at the war in Iraq blaming it for the lack of helicopters. I don’t see anyone pointing their fingers at themselves.

When Mike and I bought our first condo, we attended the yearly condo association budget meeting. The association was trying to raise condo fees to pay for the soon to be necessary improvements. The condos were over twenty years old. Some of the balconies were precarious. The swimming pool was in disrepair. The windows were aluminum frame and leaked air like they were screens. You’ve never seen an angrier bunch of retirees. They didn’t want to pay one penny more in condo fees and they were willing to argue and scream and threaten the board members.

We kept that condo for three years. We sold at the height of the market right before the Olympics and got top dollar for a condo with a rotting balcony. The president of the board resigned in frustration and the new board members adopted a strict, “Don’t fix it unless they threaten to sue” policy. We got out of there before it was obvious that things were falling apart all around us.

Mike and I took a drive through the condo park last week. They have replaced those dangerous balconies with cheap vinyl fencing that is neither aesthetic nor secure. The air of decay has set into that once lovely neighborhood all because the owners of the association didn’t want to raise the condo fees.

I suspect something similar happened in New Orleans. Politicians try their best to do what their constituents want. The fact that National Geographic was able to predict this disaster with such accuracy means that no one was really in the dark about the danger.