Evelyn C. Leeper's Quote File

Evelyn C. Leeper's Quote File

Quotations I've Used in My .signature File

Updated: 16 Aug 2019

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
                                                -Adam Rifkin

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. [Proverbs 31:8] https://www.raicestexas.org/

Often and quite contrarily, we look down on a laborer while delighting in his work.
                                                -Plutarch's "Life of Pericles"

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
                                                -Truman Capote

                                                -Gildor [J. R. R. Tolkien, LOTR]

The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted.
                                                -Walt Whitman (1871)

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

Being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility--from the very beginning.
                                                -Albert Speer

Age quod agis.

                                                -Jessica Mitford

                                                -Mark R. Leeper

We go from worrying about age-old problems to worrying about old-age problems.

                                                -L. P. Hartley

No man is great if he thinks he is.
                                                -Will Rogers

What kind of life are you living if no day is ever good enough for the good things?
                                                -Tanita Davis

The time is always right to do what is right.
                                                -Martin Luther King, Jr.

My opinions are my own. The truth belongs to everyone.
                                                -Brett Manz

Learning: the kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
                                                -Ambrose Bierce

People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.

It's never too late to be what you might have been.
                                                -George Eliot

                                                -Richard Feynman

                                                -James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses"

                                                 -Sec. of Defense James Mattis 

Remember the MS St. Louis.

                                                 -Paul Eldridge

[He] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
                                                 -Winston Churchill

The unexamined life is not worth living--but the examined one is no bargain. -Socrates/Woody Allen
                                                 -Socrates/Woody Allen

We are all our own Persons from Porlock, these days. [commenting on our attachment to electronic devices & social media]
                                                 -Robert Silverberg

"Status quo" is Latin for the mess we're in.
                                                 -West Texas farmer

"If" is a word right in the middle of "life".
                                                 -Herman Melville

                                                 -Joseph Campbell

Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that decaffeinated coffeepots should be orange.
                                                 -Danny Hillis

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
                                                 -Aldous Huxley

Eyes see surface, not reality.

Fere libenter homines id, quod volunt, credunt. (Men willingly believe what they wish.)
                                                 -Julius Caesar

                                                 -Otto von Bismarck 

                                                 -Soren F. Petersen 

                                                 -Susan Ertz

Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.
                                                 -Anthony Eden

Many alligators will be slain, but the swamp will remain.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
                                                 -Samuel Butler

                                                 -William Blake

So many see themselves as aggrieved; so few see themselves as aggrievers.
                                                 -John Allen Paulos

In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.
                                                 -Sir Terry Pratchett, NIGHT WATCH

Have you noticed that many people who claim to believe in personal responsibility spend a lot of time blaming the government?
                                                 -Mark Twain

Patience is something you admire greatly in the driver behind you but not in the one ahead of you.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

                                                 -A. Keightley

You can't ride the chairlift and call yourself Edmund Hillary.
                                                 -David McCullough, Jr.

Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the secret to success.
                                                 -Savas Dinopoulos

You can't ride the chairlift and call yourself Edmund Hillary.
                                                 -David McCullough, Jr.

It often comforts me to know that even in war's darkest days, in most parts of the world absolutely nothing is happening.
                                                 -GAME OF THRONES

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
                                                 -Edward R. Murrow 

Time [is] flowing in the middle of the night.
                                                 -Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The poor have objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
                                                 -G. K. Chesterton 

                                                 -C. Arthur

Obviousness is relative.
                                                 -John Hertz, Vanamonde #919

                                                 -Jefferson Pierce

                                                 -Philip K. Dick

Zeus does not bring to accomplishment all the thoughts of men.
                                                 -Homer, ILIAD

                                                 -Jorge Luis Borges

                                                 -Dean Acheson

When I realised that I was never going to be asked to tea by a half-man, half-goat, I knew that life was going to be a let-down.
                                                 -Ronni Acona

                                                 -Samuel Johnson

                                                 -J. R. R. Tolkien 

                                                 -Ogden Nash

                                                 -Albert Szent-Gyorgi 

Obama. Sandy. Win some, lose some.

Who's better for business? During Bush's second term the Dow Jones *dropped* 2000 points; during Obama's term it *rose* 5000 points.

                                                -Jorge Luis Borges

Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.
                                                -Stephen Hawking

A good story beats vague, formless and somewhat artsy every time.
                                                -Jim Rittenhouse

                                                -Jorge Luis Borges

                                                -Clare Boothe Luce

                                                -Carl Van Doren

Be careful of reading health books; you might die of a misprint.
                                                -Mark Twain

"I don't want to take my country back, I want to take it forward."
                                                -Jorge Luis Borges

In literature, as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others.
                                                -Andre Maurois

Even God cannot change the past.
                                                -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

                                                -Tom Stoppard


                                                -Blaise Pascal

                                                -Anatole France

Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.

"I am so small I can barely be seen. How can this great love be inside me?" "Look at your eyes. They are small but they see enormous things."

The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
                                                -Gary Shteyngart

                                                -Daniel Patrick Moynihan

To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
                                                -George Washington

Many alligators will be slain, but the swamp will remain.

                                                -Jonathan Swift

                                                -Harold Nicolson 

                                                -Aldous Huxley 

                                                -Ralph Waldo Emerson 

... O fleeting joyes Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes!
                                                -John Milton, Paradise Lost

                                                -Erich Fromm

                                                -James Baldwin


                                                -William James

                                                -Salvor Hardin, Foundation



Men have become the tools of their tools.
                                                -Henry David Thoreau


                                                -Ron Nesen, 1977

I know you can't live on hope alone but without hope life is not worth living.
                                                -Harvey Milk


                                                -Mark Twain

                                                -Samuel Johnson

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
                                                -Irene Peter 

                                                -William James

                                                -Abraham Lincoln

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
                                                -Raymond Chandler

Heretic: someone who disagrees with you about something neither of you knows anything about.

Life is complex--it has real and imaginary parts.

                                                -Konrad Lorenz

                                                -John Stuart Mill

                                                -Adam Smith

                                                -John Updike

                                                -Max Frisch

Junk is something you keep for years, then throw away two weeks before you need it.

                                                -Mark Twain

An era can be said to end when its illusions are exhausted.
                                                -Arthur Miller

Two is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2.
                                                -Grabel's Law

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.
                                                -Dan Bennett

                                                -David Brower

                                                -Matthew Arnold

                                                -Arthur Toynbee

                                                -Jonathan Swift

A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
                                                -Thomas Sowell

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

                                                -Ralph Waldo Emerson

                                                -Andre Gide

                                                -Anatole France

                                                -Niels Bohr

                                                -Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

I found a kind of party terrorism pervading and oppressing the minds of our best men.
                                                -James Garfield

The fundamental precept of liberty is toleration.
                                                -Calvin Coolidge

                                                -Thomas Jefferson

                                                -Theodore Roosevelt

                                                -Franklin Delano Roosevelt

If you want to live like a Republican, you've got to vote for a Democrat.
                                                -Harry S. Truman

"Try to keep things in perspective. Fifty years from now, kids in history classes will be yawning over what panics us today."

Separate is not equal. The right time to do the right thing is always now. Those who say 'wait' usually mean 'never.'
                                                -Bonnie Tinker and The Rev. Cecil Prescod

If you won't be better tomorrow than you are today, what need have you for tomorrow?
                                                -Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

                                                -Bill Clinton

                                                -J. D. Bernal

Dred Scott; 
Plessy v. Ferguson; 
Bowers v. Hardwick; 

                                                -Aldous Huxley

What appears to be coming at you is coming from you.
                                                -Jack Flanders

Just as you choose to believe in determinism, I am forced to believe in free will.

    -J. R. R. Tolkien, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, Book III, Chapter 2

                                                -Ludwig Wittgenstein

                                                -Brian Stableford

                                                -Jorge Luis Borges

                              -Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

                                                -Ezekiel 16:49

                                                -Adlai Stevenson

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses-- for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it...
                                                -Herman Melville

There are infimal readers, readers who want to read the same book over and over, but will never read the same book twice.
                                                -Brian Stableford

Apatheism: The school of belief where one doesn't particularly care if there is/are god(s).
                                                -Taki Kogoma

We should be as passionately opposed to those who discriminate against gays and lesbians as we were passionate in our opposition to apartheid.
  - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, February 1999, Brown University

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just screams, "Why don't you listen to me?" and lets fly with a big stick.
                                                -John W. Campbell, Jr.

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive, diffucult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
                                                -Gene Spafford, 1992

I'm coming to the conlcusion that the past really *is* another country, one that sends invading armies into this one.
                                                -Avram Grumer

Haiku for a New Year:
     2001: / A new odyssey led by / George W. Bush

Golden ages always shine more brightly from a distance.
                                                -Jack Shafer

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.
                                                -Simon Schama

Q: How many Floridians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Four! No, Two! No ... um ... wait. Can I let you know in six hours?
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of sXXXch, ... or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances.
                                                -from the First Amendment to the US ConsXXXution

                                                -Marcus Aurelius

What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.
                                                -Jean-Paul Sartre

I will say this much for the nobility: that tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious.
                                                -Mark Twain, Conn. Yank.

                                                -Mikhail Baryshnikov

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.
                                                -Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The biggest threat to traditional marriage is not two gay people who love each other, but shows like "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?"
GOP Ad: Call Al Gore. Tell him the only litmus test ought to be for patriotism.
Me: I thought that what people supporting gays in the military have been saying all along.
                                                -Ann Wells

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
                                                -Jean Cocteau

In times of great stress, it is a relief to have the assurance that I can never falsely believe that I exist.
Personally, I'm no fan of Oprah. But if she can use television to get America to read, she has accomplished a feat more daunting than Hannibal moving elephants over the Alps.
                                                -Barnet Sherman

--Richard Feynman, Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report
on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

There are two types of people in this world: those who think giant steam powered robotic spiders are stupid, and those who don't.
                                                -Bryan F. Theiss

If it's supposed to move and it doesn't, spray with WD-40; if it's not supposed to move and it does, wrap with duct tape; if it's more complicated than this, use a Swiss Army knife.
Publishing a book of poetry in the United States is liking dropping rose petals off the rim of Grand Canyon and listening for the echo.
                                                -Don Marquis

When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.
                                                -Jim Holt

Even if one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one is always of the religion of the temple which is nearest at hand.
                            -HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, book 11, chapter 1

                                                -Robert Graves

If everyone in Congress who has ever had an affair resigned, I have a feeling Barney Frank would have the place to himself.
                                                -Ailsa Murphy

A lot of writers can pull off being subtle, but it takes a genius like Melville to write a great book that is so utterly lacking in subtlety.
                                                -Fiona Webster

All work and no play makes Jack a valued employee.
That's how things are--you open the door to a possibility and the next thing you know, an actuality has you by the throat.
                                                -Russell Hoban

Lord, help me to relax about insignificant details beginning tomorrow at 11:41.23 AM EST.
Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.
                                                -David Denby

Being gay, the last time I looked, had nothing to do with reading a balance book, fixing a broken bone or changing a spark plug.
                                                -Bill Clinton

Those who do not learn from the future are destined to make mistakes in it.
                                                -Warren Miller (New Yorker)

                                                -Jonathan Swift

Life is not a "brief candle." It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
                                                -George Bernard Shaw

                                                -J.B.S. Haldane

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.
                                                -Greg Egan

Das Schone ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang. [Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.]
                                                -Rainer Maria Rilke

If it's not fun and it's not important then why am I doing it?
                                                -Bill Hyde, Bell Laboratories

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

                                                -Martin Luther King

The destiny of Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for.
                                                -Arnold Toynbee

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.
                                  -caption to plate 43 of Goya's Caprichios

If you threw all the liars out of Hollywood, Pompeii would look like a bustling metropolis, by comparison.
                                                -Peter Reiher

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.
                                        -George Eliot, Evangelical Teaching

                                                -Rep. Ed Fallon, Iowa

                                     -George Eliot, Leaves from a Note-Book

People are worried about online porn on the Internet. It's the endless `Who's better--Kirk or Picard?' threads that should scare them.
                                            -Jim Mullen, Entertainment Weekly

I like anarchy, but it's kind of hard to enforce.
                                                -Brian Westley

                                                -Joseph Joubert

                                                -Ludwig Wittgenstein

I don't care what may be his politics. I don't care what may be his religion. I don't care what may be his color. I don't care who he is. So long as he is honest, he shall be served by me.
                                                -Theodore Roosevelt

No one is ever fanatically devoted to something they have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it is. Whenever someone is fanatically devoted to a set of beliefs or dogmas or goals, it is only because those beliefs or goals are in doubt.
                                                -Robert M. Pirsig

                       -Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg on her visit to Auschwitz

                                                -Albert Einstein

Am I politically correct today? Do I do crystals and New Age? Obviously, women's music's for me--Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, and Patti Page.
                                                -Lynn Lavner

                                                -Bruce Sterling

[Your propagation may vary.]
Note to General Powell, Senator Dole, Senator Nunn, et al: Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.
                                                -Justice Thurgood Marshall

To make the point [that homosexuals hamper military effectiveness] I'd say that you would have to sift through your military history till you find an instance in which failure has been attributed to the presense of homosexuals on the losing side. I'm not aware of any such case in the past 2500 years, but I'd be interested to hear what you find.
                                                -Nathan Engle

God does not play dice with the universe.
                                                -Albert Einstein
Albert, stop telling God what to do.
                                                -Niels Bohr

God does not play dice with the universe.
                                                -Albert Einstein
Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws the dice where they can't be seen.
                                                -Stephen Hawking

IQ describes how big your gas tank is, but it doesn't tell if you're running on empty.
                                                -Harvey Newstrom

                                                -Isaac Asimov


Why can't they have gay people in the army? Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand gay guys with M16s going, "Who'd you call a faggot?"
                                                -John Stewart

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest thing: The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war is worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
                                                -John Stuart Mill

Oh, Irony! We don't get that here. No, the last time we had irony was '82, when I was the sole practitioner of it and I got tired of being stared at.
                                                -Steve Martin, ROXANNE

Never was the advice "Better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" been as true as on Usenet.
                                                -Evelyn C. Leeper

                                                -Edmund Burke


Evelyn C. Leeper (eleeper@optonline.net)

Go to Evelyn Leeper's home page.