Collected Quotations

Years back I started collecting quotations I found written down someplace and didn't want to lose. Now Google will find every quotation ever recorded. I was interested to see which quotations had caught my fancy at the time and that I took the energy to actually type out (being a 20 word a minute man makes for tough sledding on the keyboard).

I had actually planned on a well researched and brilliantly written blog post on risk but got tired out after digging out the references. You are stuck with this as I can just cut and paste.

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"It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe." - Margaret Laurence

"I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once." - Jennifer Unlimited

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -Catherine Aird

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. -Robert Brault, software developer, writer

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

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."-- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... If you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill...followed by Churchill's response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second, if there is one." -- Winston Churchill

Man that is born of a woman Hath but a short time to live, And is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flow’r; He fleeth as it were a shadow, And ne’er continueth in one stay. Job 14:1,2 KJV

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road don't expect freedom to survive very long." - Thomas Sowell

Management is about getting the best out of existing resources, under given constraints, whereas leadership is about moving beyond constraints and redefining what success means.

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." Herm Albright

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. ~ Mother Teresa

"A loving heart is the truest wisdom." Charles Dickens

"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident." Charles Lamb

"Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit." Alexandre Dumas

"I don’t know how old I am because the goat ate the bible that had my birth certificate in it. The goat lived to be twenty-seven." Satchel Paige.

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." Galileo Galilei.

"When you say that you agree to a thing on principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice." Otto Von Bismarck.

"Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." John Kenneth Gabraith

"As you go through life, you will have many opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
Take advantage of all of them." My Mother

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More another time. I have pages and pages of them, saved over 40 odd years.