Some of my favorite quotes

I love collecting quotes. Here are some I use regularly. If you are the kind who pays attention to such things, you might notice that they are mostly from dead white European males. This is not because they are the only ones who said worthwhile things, but because they had pretty much a monopoly on getting published until not that long ago. I will add more as I think of them, but I had to start somewhere.

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing to excess”. (my father, born 1932)

“The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss”. (my father, born 1932)

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session”. (Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1826-1899, 1 Tucker 24S, NY Surrogate 1866)

“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand”. (Josh Billings a.k.a. Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-1885).

“Sin is its own punishment and righteousness is its own reward. We are not punished for our sins, but by them”. (Ernest Holmes, 1887-1960, from The Science of Mind)

“People of the same trade seldom gather together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, p. 128)

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas”. (John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, p. 383)

“An inordinate fondness for beetles”, (attributed to J.B.S. Haldane, 1892-1964, a British-Indian scientist, when asked “if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history”, but possibly apocryphal).

“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim” (Jim Croce, 1943-1973, from the lyrics to You don’t mess around with Jim, 1972).

“You’re looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks, but there ain’t no Coupe de Ville hiding at the bottom of a Crackerjack box”. (Meatloaf, a.k.a. Marvin, later Michael, Lee Aday born 1947, from the lyrics to Two out of three ain’t bad, 1977, from the Bat out of hell album).

“There are three kinds of people, those who are good at math and those who aren’t”. (probably apocryphal)

“I saw a shiver running through the opposition benches, looking for a spine to run up and down”. (Helen Suzman, 1917-2009, South African parliamentarian commenting on the 1962 Sabotage Bill). For more on her, see http://hsf.org.za/about-us/helen-suzman/suz01.pdf)

“Mais dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un Amiral pour encourager les autres”. (Voltaire, a.k.a. Francois-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778, from Candide, ou l’Optimisme, 1759, p. 172, an allusion to events emanating from the Battle of Minorca, 1756; I have used modern orthography rather than that of the original)

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