Quotes of the day #5

I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks. – Groucho Marx
But why would we want his footprints? and how could we get them out?

Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow. – Arthur Stringer
Man, what wouldn’t I give to be this witty- all I can think of is , “society is like a diaper on a newborn- it is guaranteed to eventually be shitty.”

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. – PJ O’Rourke
Lemming migration? The indignity of being one of the masses. Or a lemming…

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read “President Can’t Swim”. – Lyndon B. Johnson
You know, ’cause it’s all about the spin, you know?

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience. – John Cage
But how does one explain the popularity of Céline Dion? ‘Cause it’s definitely not musical and somehow I don’t think it is the kind of experience John Cage was talking about. I am sure he never considered shrieking banshees mascarading as musical sound….

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package. – John Ruskin
I am trying to figure out if this is good or bad. Is he talking literally? Is he talking about the size of one’s penis? The images in my head are truly frightening right now…

The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders. – Foster’s Law
This sounds like something a grandmother would say, her index finger wagging in front of your nose and her chin jutting out in a self righteous grandmotherly way. yeah, yeah. At least they find what they are looking for, as opposed to the other schmucks who wander around lost and disappointed their whole lives.

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality. – Norman Douglas
For good reason. Reality ain’t no walk in the park. Wait a minute…that’s reality… well, it ain’t no bowl of cherries. Wait a minute…that’s reality…It ain’t…Oh, shut up.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
– Samuel Johnson
Yeah? Well..wel.. your dead, so there!

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
– Philip K. Dick
I think this is true in many cases. For example, bureaucracy- the only sane thing to do is to go insane.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
– Robert Frost
That’s it? No other wisdom for us Mister Frost? What about all that shite about the long road, huh? Was I just dreaming that episode in my high school English class? What is the use of being a poet if you can’t be a little more verbose than that?

The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
– Thomas H. Huxley
I don’t know what to say about this. I am just feeling his pain right now.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
– Leo Tolstoy
This one speaks for itself. I imagine a whole room of historians just droning like the history professor in Harry Potter who was so boring he forgot to stop teaching after he died.

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
– Jane Austen
DING,DING,DING!!!!!! We have a winner folks! I think this might be my most favouritest quote ever, especially given who wrote it. I might just get my mother to embroider this beaut for me so I can frame it and place it above my bedroom door (which attacks anyone who tries to open it with horribly long slivers).

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
– Jane Wagner
Damn it. Anything collective has got to be wrong, right?

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
– Harry Shearer
No, I think it probably just makes you dirty. And hungry. And probably sore. The meek might inherit the Earth when all this living is over and done with, but I wonder if they will want it after the treatment they received?