Category: Verbatim
Quote du Jour
Fear is an expectation of evil. Under fear are arranged the following emotions: terror, shame, nervous shrinking, consternation, panic, mental agony. Terror is fear which produces fright; shame is fear of disgrace; nervous shrinking is a fear that one will have to act; consternation is fear due to a presentation of some unusual occurrence; panic is fear with pressure exercised by sound; mental agony is fear felt when some issue is still in suspense.
— Zeno the Stoic (c. 335-c. 263 B.C.), Greek philosopher
Quote du Jour
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold; and a citizen who knows that the earth is round and older than six thousand years is less dangerous than one of equal capacity who believes it is a flat ground floor between a first floor heaven and a basement hell.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright
Quote du Jour
“I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
— Adlai Stevenson (1900 – 1965), Illinois governor (1949-1953), Democratic candidate for President in 1952 and 1956, and United States Ambassador to the United Nations (1961-1965)
Quote du Jour
We spend our lives doing things we detest, to make money to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like. We never want to be doing what we’re doing. When we eat, we read; when we watch TV, we eat; when we drive, we listen to music; when we listen to music, we work around the house. When we want to be with friends, we go to a noisy restaurant; when we want to party, we spend the evening trying to converse.
— Laurance Peter (1919-1990), American educator, creator of the Peter Principle
Quote du Jour
Who would be cleared by their Un-American Committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity toward all. Not Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiement is being made ‘we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.’
— Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998), American educator
Quote du Jour
When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument, and good order.
— Thomas Paine (1737 -1809) Pamphleteer, anti-monarchist, American founder
Quote du Jour
Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. Not all things are black and white. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The soooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
— Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956), American physician, author
Top 10 Stupid Post-Katrina Quotes
Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine to 2005! Here are some doozies uttered by the people that brought us the Katrina disaster (Mother Nature exempted). They range from the blithely idiotic to the utterly clueless to the maliciously racist.
1) “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” — President Bush, on “Good Morning America,” Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina
2) “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them.” — Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 5, 2005
3) “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” — President Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown, while touring hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, Sept. 2, 2005
4) “Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.” — FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005
5) “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?” – House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005
6) “We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do … The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.” (Laughter) — President Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005
7) “Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.’ Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.” – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, blaming media coverage for the government’s failings, “Meet the Press,” Sept. 4, 2005
8) “What didn’t go right?'” –President Bush, as quoted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), after she urged him to fire FEMA Director Michael Brown “because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right” in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort
9) “I mean, you have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” –Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Sept. 6, 2005
10) “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals…many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.” – CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, on New Orleans’ hurricane evacuees, Sept. 1, 2005
These quotes are also available here.
