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| Douglas Adams | The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | To err is human; to forgive, infrequent. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel. | |
| John Adams | I Said to my Wife, I have accepted a Seat in the House of Representatives and thereby have consented to my own Ruin to your Ruin and the Ruin of our Children. I give you this Warning that you may prepare your Mind for your Fate. | |
| John Adams | [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Law logic -- an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else. | |
| Herbert Sebastien Agar | The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. | |
| Roger Allen | Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees. | |
| Woody Allen | We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. | |
| Woody Allen | The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep. | |
| Oscar Ameringer | Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. | |
| Laurie Anderson | Paradise is just like where you are right now, only much better. | |
| Anonymous Gold Miner | All and everybody, this is my claim, fifty feet on the gulch, cordin to Clear Creek District Law, backed up by shotgun amendments. | |
| Aristophanes | Under every stone lurks a politician. | |
| Thurman Arnold | The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Cocaine habit forming? Of course not. I ought to know, I've been using it for years. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. | |
| Dave Barry | As a taxpayer, you are required to be fully in compliance with the United States Tax Code, which is currently the size and weight of the Budweiser Clydesdales. | |
| Dave Barry | The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and time again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | I promise you a police car on every sidewalk. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa? | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate. | |
| Gerald Barzan | Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. | |
| Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais | As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything. | |
| Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais | Provided I do not write about the government, or about religion, or politics, or morals, or those in power, or public bodies, or the Opera, or the other state theatres, or about anybody who is active in anything, I can print whatever I want. | |
| Samuel Beckett | We are all born mad. Some remain so. | |
| Ernest Benn | Politics is the art of looking for trouble,finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. | |
| Yogi Berra | If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. ... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the government from running amuck by hamstringing it. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third. | |
| William Blake | Where there is money there is no art. | |
| Bill Bonner | The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for. | |
| Daniel Boorstin | We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Public apathy is more powerful than public opinion. There's more of it. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble. | |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Reality is not always probable, or likely. | |
| James Bovard | Democracy must be something more than two
wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. | |
| Bertolt Brecht | Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you! | |
| Ashleigh Brilliant | I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. | |
| Ashleigh Brilliant | I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you. | |
| Ashleigh Brilliant | By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me. | |
| David Broder | Anybody that wants
the Presidency so much
that he'll spend two years
organizing and campaigning for it
is not to be trusted
with the office. | |
| Heywood Hale Broun | The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil. | |
| Art Buchwald | Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before. | |
| Frank Gelett Burgess | Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress. | |
| Edmund Burke | They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance. | |
| George Burns | Too bad all the people who know how to run this country are busy running taxicabs or cutting hair. | |