She said I know what it's like to be read...and quoted.

Dorothy Parker discovers that a right cross is actually sometimes more effective than wit. "I used to try to draw blood with satirical barbs. Then I learnt boxing, and I realised that just hitting some bastard hard was surprisingly often more effective. And also, the pen really is mightier than the sword, if you can jab them in the eye first! I'm having a ball and if I lay 'em all out end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised".




Dear sports, I have a vast backlog of quotes, which can be pretty painful! So I thought that you may be hip to these. Sure, being a cheapskate, I'll probably recycle them later in other posts, but man, along with good impressionists, quotes are one of my favourite things.

Unfortunately, in my rush to grab the many great quotes ordinary people write in comments sections, I didnt always get the source. I hope the writers don't mind. I tried to keep the editing to a minimum. I may make letters, quotes and comments a regular feature as they're such inspiring and insightful fun and gee, I've got such a vast collection of them too.

These are from quite a few sources, many old favourites, including comments left on sites and blogs. They are all from other people, not I. In fact, the only people I know are other people. At the end of this post is a swingin' haiku by US Space, better known as 'Absurd Thoughts About God'. Diggest them all, oh fellow hepcats.



“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time”. James Thurber.

“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking”. AA Milne.

“The single greatest weakness of Western culture is the ability to draw a moral equivalence between anything and everything. It’s really an inability to see anything in due proportion”. Mark Steyn.

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds”.
Sir Francis Bacon.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning”.
Albert Einstein.

“Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves”. Carl Sagan.

"Leftism is recognizable by three earmarks. It is founded in ignorance, focused on irrelevance, and engaged in wishful thinking”. Mark Alger.

“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book”. Edward Gibbon.

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way”. Bertrand Russell.

“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot reason is a fool; and he who dares not reason is a slave”.
Sir William Drummond.

“Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle”. Ken Hakuta.

“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men”. George Eliot.

“Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors”. Thomas H. Huxley.

“One of the appeals of leftism is that you can never be called a hypocrite. That is, if you have no standards, then there is no standard by which to judge you”. Gagdad Bob.

"As I said before Yank, in time, this will be an embarassment to all of those who believed in this global warming scam. I am not an expert, but I've read enough from both sides to know it's not conclusive, and certainly not worth risking the entirety of all free market's economic growth on it.

Why is it that the "solution" is always of a Leftist flavor? Has a solution ever been "cut taxes and let the people keep more of their money and be free?" I mean, aside from getting out of a recession when it really matters, why is it that the solution to all that ails society, is always more government and higher taxes? It is not coincidence and you know it”. Captaincapitalism blogspot.

“A [Left] liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment”. Willis Player.

“Half the English language is becoming the "N-word" as far as [Left] Liberals are concerned. Words are always bad for Liberals. Words allow people to understand what Liberals are saying”.
Anne Coulter.

“There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause”. P.J O’Rourke.

"Messages that make use of allegedly true stories, news reports, pictures and references to apparently reputable sources in an attempt to lend an air of objectivity and truthfulness to the extremely negative characterization of the targeted group have been found to be likely to expose members of the targeted group to hatred and contempt." CHRC. Canadian Human Rights Commission.

“Read that again slowly. Citing news reports, reputable sources, facts, statistics, documentation, quotations, references, scholarly studies, etc., has been "found" to be clear evidence of your "likely" "pre-crime." Mark Steyn.

“I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up”. Tom Lehrer.

Salim Mansur at the Toronto Star: ‘It will not be surprising to learn the CHRC bureaucrats find incomprehensible the observation made by Ronald Dworkin, a highly respected legal philosopher, "the only right you don't have in a democracy is the right not to be offended."

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment than by violent and sudden usurpations”. James Madison.

"Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it."
Andrew Carnegie.

"Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude." Ralph Marston.

“The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything, or nothing”. Nancy Astor.

“No conservatives, that is, true conservatives, can be fascists, by definition". Sure, if you want to say that those who want to do the things I listed aren’t real conservatives, then you’re correct. Obviously, since conservatism, properly understood and practiced, believes in individual liberty and limited government, it cannot in any way be likened to fascism, an ideology that is, among other things, collectivist and totalitarian.

I think the greatest difference between fascism and conservatism is that the former believes that the state has an end goal or purpose. And that everything belongs to the state in its attainment of that goal. It’s this thought as well, it seems to me, that links fascism with current liberalism. We hear all the time liberals or progressives state. “We will not rest until every child has health care” or “We will not stop until every person has a good job and a good house etc, etc. Until we have a perfect nation, government must continue to expand and increase its power”. That is absolutely antithetical to conservatism. SteveMG on Hotair 17 Jan 08.

sinsing said: “Colmes proved, once again, that liberals are recklessly hell bent on silencing the opposition. Leftists have become confrontational, rude, arrogant and bulling fascists, because they fear that logic and truth will reveal their stupidity and true agendas”. I see interesting parallels here.

For years, I have been trying to understand why Liberals go out of their way to defend Islam, which is about as fascist an ideology as one can get. If Liberals really were against “fascism,” they would be first in line to support the nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they would be shoulder to shoulder with conservatives to stop Islamic infiltration and subversion of our society through immigration, financial manipulation, propaganda, and other means.

In this light, Goldberg’s book is for me a welcome analysis.

The reaction to his book so far is instructive as well. Whenever you criticize the belief system of the Liberals, they take it as an assault on their identity, and they react with bullying (fascist!) tactics, as sinsing pointed out. The exact same behavior comes from the Muslims when their belief system is criticized.

By this common Fascist behavioural predisposition, Colmes and others are instantly offended, and mindlessly go on the attack, when they see a Hitlerian smiley face on the cover of Jonah Goldberg’s book, [Left] Liberal Fascism, just as the Muslims rioted over the Mohammed cartoons and the Mohammed Teddy Bear”. Stendec on Hotair.com 17 Jan 08.

‘There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”:(1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value, and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

One of the entries under “property rights”, is that the right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree—and thus keeps the road open to man’s most valuable attribute (valuable personally, socially, and objectively): the creative mind.
Ayn Rand, ‘Atlas Shrugged’.

"It is possible to claim that some of the ideas behind the globalist, open-border ideology that now permeates the West are ultimately derived from Christian universalism. It does represent a real problem, not an invented one, when many Christian leaders undermine our national borders by opening their arms to mass immigration, and too many Christian leaders are at the forefront of appeasing Islam in the name of peace and the brotherhood of man." Fjordman.

"The Modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; but their truth is pitiless. And thus some humanitarians care only for pity; but their pity is often untruthful."
GK Chesterton.

“The single greatest weakness of Western culture: It is the ability to draw a moral equivalence between anything and everything. It’s really an inability to see anything in due proportion”.
Mark Steyn.

On everything from Indian policy to education, ideological purity now trumps even the most obvious failures in practice. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had”.
Michael Chrichton.

“GENOCIDAL ECO-MANIACS: Everyone's favourite comment on the eco-fascists is, or should be, that of President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic: "What is at risk is not the climate but freedom…I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning".

But I wondered if you were also familiar with this wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience".

Apart from amending this to "the supposed good of its victims", I'd say that pretty much covers it, wouldn't you?” Ted. London, United Kingdom.

“The great tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”. Thomas H. Huxley.

Absurd thoughts about God blogspot:
"absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
always believe in books

of course if it's in print
then you know it must be true

absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
outlaw critical writing

that challenges conventions
political correctness

absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
don't write any more books

the world has more than enough
they might cause undue stress".