Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[madviking]

"The saddest thing I ever did see
Was a woodpecker peckin' at a plastic tree.
He looks at me, and 'Friend,' says he,
'Things ain't as sweet as they used to be.'"

Shel Silverstein

 

[Dachs]

"Two shots to the head. You ask me, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."
-DA Harvey Dent, discussing the murder of Johnny Viti, The Long Halloween

 

[Borachio]

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."

Voltaire

 

[Borachio]

A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end.

Early C20th Socialist slogan.

 

[Phrossack]

"DIE, n.
The singular of 'dice.' We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, 'Never say die.' At long intervals, however, some one says: 'The die is cast,' which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:
A cube of cheese no larger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie."

-Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

 

[Borachio]

Die, n. The only word ever defined as the singular of another word.

In contrast: Cow, n. The singular of cattle, and cows. See? It doesn't work so well.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

"People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power, are barbarians."

- George Lucas, 1988

 

[Borachio]

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

James Joyce

 

[Gucumatz]

"Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water? Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions."

- Richard Nixon

Also from Nixon:

"These absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never"

 

[Gucumatz]

I don't what they [the North Vietnamese] want up there, but I don't want to get involved in a land war in Asia!

- LBJ

 

[Borachio]

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Dorothy Parker

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

The future is a sphinx with two minds, an energy which offers itself and denies, gives itself and resists, seeks to enthrone us and seeks to slay. But the conquest has to be attempted, the wager has to be accepted. We have to face the future’s offer of death as well as its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to our old names and forms that we shall live most vitally in greater and newer forms and names. Go on we must; for if we do not, Time itself will force us forward in spite of our fancied immobility.

.............

 

[Borachio]

already autumn

even sprinkles of rain

in the moon's shape

Matsuo Basho

 

[Ironsided]

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 

[Hygro]

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It's a reference to the Garden of Eden and you heard it here, first.

 

[Borachio]

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Thomas Paine

 

[Ironsided]

It's a reference to the Garden of Eden and you heard it here, first.

If thats biblical mumbo jumbo I'm lost by default. The quote is from "Discourse on Inequality" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

 

[Hygro]

If thats biblical mumbo jumbo I'm lost by default. The quote is from "Discourse on Inequality" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite quotes in the world. I just wonder if Rousseau was intentionally or unintentionally making a reference to the Garden of Eden, or an analogy of the garden therein.

 

[Ironsided]

Yeah, it's one of my favorite quotes in the world. I just wonder if Rousseau was intentionally or unintentionally making a reference to the Garden of Eden, or an analogy of the garden therein.

I kind of hope so. He was an enlightened man. Maybe he was having a laugh.

What do I know I never read the bible.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

d00d you're totally missing out! Act I is chock-full of sex and war and genocide; it's like a Hollywood film, but uncensored!

Act II, though... Most people opt to skip it since it pulls a 180 and goes off on some hippie universal love tangent.