Good Quotations by Famous People:

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."

- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."

- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)

"Don't be so humble - you are not that great."

- Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat

"His ignorance is encyclopedic"

- Abba Eban (1915-)

"If a man does his best, what else is there?"

- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."

- Warren Zevon

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

- A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet."

- Saint Augustine (354-430)

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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

- Galileo Galilei

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."

- Emile Zola (1840-1902)

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

"The full use of your powers along lines of excellence."

- definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

- e e cummings (1894-1962)

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

"Assassins!"

- Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra

"I'll moider da bum."

- Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."

- Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Discours de la Methode"

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."

- Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."

- Yoda ('The Empire Strikes Back')

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"Wit is educated insolence."

- Aristotle (284-322 B.C.)

"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher."

- Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

- Gore Vidal

"Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them."

- Samuel Palmer (1805-80)

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows."

- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

"Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny."

- Guy Davenport

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

- Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

"I would have made a good Pope."

- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

- John von Neumann (1903-1957)

"The mistakes are all waiting to be made."

- chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game's opening position

"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims."

- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."

- H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"What do you take me for, an idiot?"

General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy

"I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon."

- Bill Hirst

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."

- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."

- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

"A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."

- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

- Gloria Steinem

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

- William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."

- Martin Fraquhar Tupper

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."

- Goethe (1749-1832)

"In the end, everything is a gag."

- Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."

- Lucille S. Harper

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

- Yogi Berra

"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known."

- Walt Disney (1901-1966)

"He who hesitates is a damned fool."

- Mae West (1892-1980)

"Good teaching is one-forth preparation and three-fourths theater."

- Gail Godwin

"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

- Henry Kissinger (1923-)

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty."

- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."

- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

"If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."

- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

"I am not young enough to know everything."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

- General George Patton (1885-1945)

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking."

- Katherine Cebrian

"I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it."

- Steven Wright

"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."

- Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."

- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

"I have read your book and much like it."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"The cover of this book are too far apart."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."

- Voltaire (1694-1778)

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."

- Mae West (1892-1980)

"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."

- Elvis Presley (1935-1977)

"No Sane man will dance."

- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."

- Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

"Vote early and vote often."

- Al Capone (1899-1947)

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."

- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"Hell is other people."

- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."

- Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion)

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

- Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."

- Thomas Jones

"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."

- Al Capone (1899-1947)

"The gods too are fond of a joke."

- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."

- Gloria Leonard