Quotations
Used in the 'WMail' Newsletter
and the Dateline Chamesa blog

Page Two

Alphabetical by Author
A thru C

here on Page Two: D • E • F

G thru J • K thru N • O thru R • S thru Z

Proverbs & Anonymous • Laws of Life

Books of Quotations Page

Working Minds Homepage
free monthly 'WMail' Philosophy Newsletter [2000-2007]
Index of All Issues

After WMail Issue #72 in October 2007, essays & quotations & news are being posted to the
Dateline Chamesa weblog

Authors D thru F

Anthony J. D'Angelo
“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.”  {blog 5/2017}

Isaac D'Israeli [1766-1848]
“The wise make proverbs and fools repeat them.”  {blog 3/2010}

polymath & visionary Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1519]
• • “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself. The height of a man's success is gauged by
his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. And this law is: the expansion of eternal justice.
He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.
They went out and happened to things.”  {blog 6/2019}

British children's author Roald Dahl [1916-90]
• • “We are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden
in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” - in "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory"  {blog 11/2015}
• • “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” - in "The Witches" [1983]  {blog 11/2016}
• • “One way or another every human being is unique, for better or for worse.”  {blog 1/2022}

• • “So please, oh please,
we beg, we pray,
go throw your TV set away,
and in its place you can install,
a lovely bookcase on the wall.”  {blog 5/2022}

• • “If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”  {blog 1/2023}

Daily Kos independent news site [est. 2002]
• • “It hurts Trump to hear the truth about himself.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The Biden boom is real.” - 18 March 2024  {blog 4/2024}
• • “[Republicans are] an extremist party trying to pass as a normal one.”  {blog 7/2024}
• • headline “Let’s face the facts: Voters aren’t facing the facts.”  {blog 7/2024}

Salvador Dali [1904-89]
• • “The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not a madman.”  {Issue #40}
• • “I don't do drugs. I am drugs . . . There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”  {blog 6/2018}

mega-investor Ray Dalio
“History has shown that democracies are healthy when the principles that bind people together are stronger
than those that divide them.”  {blog 9/2017 & 2/2021}

Elaine S. Dalton
“If you desire to make a difference in the world, you must be different from the world.”  {blog 11/2020}

stand-up comedian Rodney Dangerfield [1921-2004]
“Every man has a tale of woe; unfortunately, there's more woe than tail.”  {blog 7/2024}

reporter Ungelbah Daniel-Davila
“Remember, what happens in Las Vegas goes on Facebook.”  {blog 5/2012}

musician Charlie Daniels
“Son, they can't do what you do. Just go out there and do what you do.”  {blog 5/2016}

Dante {Alighieri} [1265-1321]
• • “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises
maintain their neutrality.”  {Issue #28 & blog 4/2015}
• • “The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.”  {blog 4/2024}

Alan Dapre
“Why be extraordinary . . . when you can be ordinary?”  {blog 5/2015}

Frank Darabont
“Get busy living, or get busy dying.” - in his screenplay "Shawshank Redemption”, 1994  {Issue #70}

Byron Darnton, New York Times reporter
“Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad.” (about W.C. Fields)  {blog 10/2008}

Clarence Darrow [1857-1938]
• • “There is no such thing as justice – in or out of court.”  {Issue #53}
• • “With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.
They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for developing character in man,
than any other association of men.”  (1909)  {Issue #56}
• • “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “History keeps repeating itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.”  {blog 10/2011}
• • “The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  {blog 5/2020}

Charles Darwin [1809-82]
• • “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one
most responsive to change.”   {blog 3/2008}  added 4/2020: summation often mis-attributed to Darwin
• • “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”  {blog 6/2015}

Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802]
British physician, scientist, reformer & poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin [1809-82]
“He who allows oppression, shares the crime.”  {blog 8/2017}

Bhagavan Das
“Worrying is praying for what you don't want.”  {blog 11/2022}

Ram Dass
• • “If you think [that] you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “When all is said and done, we're really just walking each other home.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”  {blog 3/2023}

futurist Jim Dator
“There is no such thing as the future. Instead, there are before us a multitude of alternative futures, of possible futures,
of plausible futures.”  {blog 11/2017}

Aviva Dautch of London, U.K.
“I've seen several tweets comparing [Trump's concentration camps] to Nazis and the Holocaust and saying things like 'this is how it begins'.
I teach holocaust literature so let me be clear: this isn't how it began. This is already several stages along the way.”  {blog 6/2018}

TV personality Cazzie David
“People sage their homes after I leave.”  {blog 2/2021}

TV personality Larry David
“I don't like to be out of my comfort zone, which is about a half-inch wide.”  {blog 10/2017}

Gordon Davidson [1933-2016]
“[The theater] should challenge us with questions. Not answers, but questions.”  {blog 12/2007}

Ida Fisher Davidoff [1903-2001], expert on aging
“We do not grow old. We become old by not growing.”  {blog 8/2017}

outdoor writer John Clary Davies
“I believe that, come summer, ice cream is considered one of the major food groups.”  {blog 7/2018}

Welsh poet W.H. Davies [1871-1940]
“What is this life, if full of care / we have no time to stand and stare”  {blog 2/2017}

Angela Davis
“Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life.
When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.”  {Issue #54}

actress Bette Davis [1908-89]
• • “When I was young, I was terribly concerned with what people thought of me.
But now I'm more concerned with what I think of them.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Getting old is not for sissies.”  {blog 2/2012}
• • “If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night . . .” - in "All About Eve" [1950]  {blog 11/2020}

poet Catherine Breese Davis [1924-2002]
“After a time, all losses are the same. One more thing lost is one thing less to lose; and we go stripped at last the way [that] we came.”  {blog 4/2016}

Damon Davis
“Fear is like a disease. When it moves, it moves like wildfire. But what happens when, even in the face of that fear, you do what you've got to do?
That's called courage. And just like fear, courage is contagious.”  {blog 8/2017}

Elmer Davis [1890-1958]
“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”  {blog 12/2013}

movie director Julie Davis
“It was possible. And possible was all [that] I needed.”  {blog 7/2010}

jazz legend Miles Davis [1926-91]
“When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad.”  {blog 9/2016}

actor & activist Ossie Davis [1917-2005]
“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.”  {blog 2/2019}

biologist Richard Dawkins
• • “Religion is the enemy of truth.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed,
intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.
Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “Remember, if you don't sin, then Jesus died for nothing.”  {blog 12/2024}

activist Dorothy Day [1897-1980]
• • “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”  {blog 10/2016}
• • “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”  {blog 8/2017}
• • “We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”  {blog 9/2018}

actor Daniel Day-Lewis
“The responsibility of a creative life is both a curse and a blessing. It's the thing that gives you life and is killing you at the same time.”  {blog 12/2017}

French author Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850]
• • “It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “Finance, like Time, devours its own children.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “Laws are spider webs thru which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “It is easy to sit up and take notice, what is difficult is getting up and taking action.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “Behind every fortune is a crime.”  {blog 5/2016}

Simone de Beauvoir [1908-86]
“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”   {blog 3/2014}

Alain de Botton of Switzerland
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”  {blog 7/2013}

Henry de Braxton [XIIIth Century]
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  {Issue #56}

Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]
• • “Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Forewarned, forarmed; to be prepared is half the victory.”  {blog 10/2017}

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881-1955]
• • “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies
of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.”  {blog 4/2024}

François-René de Chateaubriand [1768-1848]
“The more serious the face, the more beautiful the smile.”  {blog 12/2008}

Tim De Christopher
• • “The hard truth is that [the climate movement] has failed not because conservatives are stupid,
but because liberals are cowards.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “The opposite of hope is empowerment.”  {blog 7/2010}

Luciano De Crescenzo
“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.”  {blog 1/2014}

Christian de Duve
“In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.”  {blog 11/2020}

Charles de Gaulle [1890-1970]
“Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.”  {blog 10/2017}

French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel [1903-87]
“Conceived as the foundation for liberty, modern democracy paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against
power, it ends by providing power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.”  {blog 12/2024}

game designer Bernard Louis De Koven [1941-2018]
“A playful path is the shortest route to happiness.”  {blog 11/2022}

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette [1757-1834]
“How have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry.
That is how I have always loved liberty.”  {blog 1/2014}

François de La Rochefoucauld [1613-80]
• • “Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them of others.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The heart is the first feature of working minds.”  {Issue #45}
• • “Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of
with the world looking on.”  {Issue #67}
• • “In the human heart, new passions are forever being born. The overthrow of one
almost always means the rise of another.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.”  {blog 1/2011}
• • “To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.”  {blog 12/2013}

François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt [1747-1827]
“Virtue would not go far without vanity to escort her.”  {blog 5/2016}

Italian movie producer Dino De Laurentiis [1919-2010]
“Just be sure that [that] you can look at yourself in the mirror every day and be proud of what you've done,
whether you're successful or not.”  {blog 7/2021}

Iñigo de Leon
“The cure for writer’s cramp is writer’s block.”  {blog 5/2010}

Anthony de Mello [1931-87]
“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.”  {blog 3/2020}

choreographer Agnes de Mille [1905-93]
“The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.”  {blog 5/2013}

Henry de Montherlant [1896-1972]
• • “Most people do not read. If they read, they do not understand.
And those who understand forget.”  {Issue #41}
• • “One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon.”  {blog 11/2008}

Alfred de Musset [1810-57]
“How glorious it is, but how painful it is also, to be exceptional in this world!”  {Issue #43}

actor Robert De Niro
“As long as our country's leadership is so appalling and so corrupt, I'll be speaking out at every venue.
To be silent in the face of such villainy is to be complicit.”  {blog 12/2018}

businessman Max De Pree [1924-2017]
“We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”  {blog 1/2023}

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy [1618-93]
“Absence is to love what wind is to fire: it extinguishes the small, it rekindles the great.”  {blog 12/2012}

Cardinal de Retz [1613-79]
“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment".
{"Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif."}  {blog 2/2009}

aviator & author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-1944] of France
• • “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add,
but when there is no longer anything to take away.”  {Issue #43}
• • “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks
and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”  {blog 3/2011}
• • “I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
("On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.")
— in "The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)" [1943 novel]  {blog 8/2012 & 7/2015}
• • “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “Language is the source of misunderstandings.”  {blog 8/2015}

• •“Toutes les grandes personnes ont un jour été des enfants, mais peu d'entre elles s'en souviennent.”
“All grown-ups were children, but few of them remember.”  {blog 9/2015}

• •“Pour ce qui est de l’avenir, il ne s’agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible.” - in "Citadelle", 1948
"As far as the future is to be expected, it is not a question of predicting it, but of making it possible.”  {blog 10/2021}

• • “When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.”  {blog 12/2023}

Madame de Stael [1766-1817]
• • “Intellect does not attain its full force until it attacks power.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”  {blog 2/2012}

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord [1754–1838]
“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.”  {blog 12/2019}

Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59]
• • “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind
and real freedom of discussion as in America.”  {Issue #27}
• • “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize [that] they can bribe
the people with their own money.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “If it is true that the human mind leans at one extreme toward the bounded, material, and useful,
at the other it naturally rises toward the infinite, immaterial, and beautiful.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes
should not remain in the same hands.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”  {blog 3/2017}

Miguel de Unamuno [1864-1936]
• • “The thought of death makes the authentic man.”  {Issue #22}
• • “Consciousness is a disease.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”  {blog 3/2008}

Peter De Vries [1910-93]
• • “I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.” – in his 1959 novel "The Tent of Wickedness" ~~ NOT said by Yogi Berra  {blog 6/2017}

baseball player Dizzy Dean [1910-74]
“It ain't bragging if you can back it up.”  {blog 12/2008}

Howard Dean
• • “Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage has decreased 38% since 1968.” (in 2003)  {Issue #46}
• • “The U.S. Supreme Court put the government up for sale.” - in 2015  {blog 7/2015}

actor James Dean [1931-55]
“Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.”  {blog 5/2008}

musician and sausage mogul Jimmy Dean [1928-2010]
• • “You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”  {blog 4/2015}

John Dean
“Having been in the belly of the beast of an imperial presidency, I can tell you
[that the Bush administration] is a dangerous presidency.” (2004)  {Issue #47}

blogger Suzy Dean
“Socializing with alcohol is fun and we should not pretend otherwise.”  {blog 5/2013}

labor leader Eugene V. Debs [1855-1926]
• • “Men do not shrink from work, but from slavery. The man who works primarily for the benefit of another
does so only from compulsion, and work so done is the very essence of slavery.”  {Issue #36}
• • “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”  {blog 1/2012}
• • “The most heroic word in all languages is 'revolution'.”  {blog 6/2019}

photographer Roy DeCarava [1919-2009]
“A photograph doesn't have to be pretty to be true. But if it's true, it's beautiful.”  {blog 11/2009}

Warwick Deeping [1877-1950]
“I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.”  {blog 2/2011}

painter Edgar Degas [1834-1917]
• • “A work of art is a thing that requires as much cunning and viciousness as the perpetration of a crime.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “Art is not what you see but what you make others see.”  {blog 3/2013 & 5/2022}

daytime TV host Ellen Degeneres
“Do we have to know who is gay and who is straight? Can't we just love everybody and judge them by the car [that] they drive?”  {blog 8/2015}

Thomas Dekker [1572-1632]
“This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”  {blog 6/2018}

Samuel R. 'Chip' Delany
“Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there, it's about thinking how that world might be – a particularly important exercise for
those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world [that] we live in, they – and all of us – have to be able to think about
a world that works differently.”  {blog 12/2017}

writer Don DeLillo
• • “California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
in the novel "White Noise" [1985]  {blog 1/2014}
• • “If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness. it will probably mean that the thing [that] we're talking about when we use
the word 'identity' has reached an end.”  {blog 11/2015}
• • “It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “It's the things [that] we forget about that tell us who we are.”  {blog 6/2016}

Michael Dell
• • “If you're the smartest person in the room, find another room.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.”  {blog 12/2017}

folk singer Iris DeMent
“And it feels like I'm livin' in the wasteland of the free.”, in 1996  {blog 5/2015}

Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]
• • “God means us to be free. With divine daring, He gave us the power of choice.”  {blog 3/2011}
• • “I make my pictures for people, not for critics.”  {blog 2/2012}
• • “Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture.”  {blog 5/2012}

management expert Dr. W. Edwards Deming [1900-93]
• • “Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival.”  {Issue #30}
• • “Without data you are another person with an opinion.”  {blog 5/2016}

Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes [384–322 B.C.E.]
“Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.”  {blog 3/2015}

boxer Jack Dempsey [1895-1983]
“A champion is someone who gets up when he can't.”  {blog 8/2014}

M.A. Denck
“Those believing [that] they have not voted are mistaken, for their indifference
affects all our futures.”  {blog 11/2007 & 2/2014}

philosopher Daniel Dennett
• • “The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – especially not from yourself.”   {blog 8/2014}
• • “Consciousness is an intellectual illusion.”  {blog 1/2022}

comic strip character Dennis the Menace [est. 1951]
drawn by Hank Ketcham [1920-2001] and by others since then
• • “I'm so hungry I could eat a vegetable.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . for all the fun stuff . . . thanks a heap!”
~~ bedtime prayer by Dennis in a syndicated daily cartoon panel  {blog 5/2018}

Felix Dennis [1947-2014], owner of The Week Magazine [est. 1995 in U.K., USA 2001]
• • “My rule is, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It's cheaper in the long run.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “Whosoever plants a tree / Winks at immortality” ~~ a Post-It poem  {blog 8/2014}

Patrick Dennis [1921-76], creator of "Auntie Mame" [1955]
“I always start writing with a clean sheet of paper and a dirty mind.”  {blog 4/2017}

sportswriter James Dent
“A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing,
and the lawnmower is broken.”   {blog 7/2015}

William Deresiewicz
“It is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true,
and it is our job to deal with it.”   {Issue #59}

Jacques Derrida [1930-2004]
“Philosophy poses the question: What should we do to have the best possible lives?”  {Issue #30}

French/Dutch philosopher René Descartes [1596-1650]
• • “Wonderment is the first passion of all. Those without any natural inclination to this passion are ordinarily very ignorant.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “Doubt is the origin of wisdom.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.”  {blog 2/2021}
• • “Today, then, as I have suitably freed my mind from all cares, and have secured for myself an assured leisure in peaceful solitude,
I shall at last apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.”  {blog 7/2021}
• • “Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.”  {blog 10/2021}
• • “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life
you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”  {blog 8/2023 & 7/2024}
• • “Conquer yourself rather than the world.”  {blog 12/2024}

French comedian Pierre Desproges [1939-88]
“You can laugh about anything, but not with anyone.”  {blog 7/2018}

physicist David Deutsch of U.K.
“Knowledge has an infinite scope, and could take us across the galaxy.”  {blog 10/2018}

British distiller Thomas Robert Dewar [1864-1930]
“Judge a man not by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes.”  {blog 2/2011}

educator John Dewey [1859-1952]
• • “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “The government is the shadow cast by business over society.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow
will not change the substance.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”  {blog 2/2018}

actress Colleen Dewhurst [1924-91]
“In Hollywood, they'll forgive you if you're two-faced, but not if you're two-chinned.”   {blog 4/2009}

Junot Diaz
“Success loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.”  {blog 9/2012}

actor Leonardo DiCaprio
“If you can do what you do best and be happy, you're further along in life than most people.”  {blog 3/2018}

sci-fi author Philip K. Dick [1928-82]
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.”  {blog 12/2007}

British author Charles Dickens [1812-70]
• • “If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will'. Consider nothing impossible,
then treat possibilites as probabilities.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • “Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas.” - in "A Christmas Carol", 1843  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”  {blog 12/2023}

poet Emily Dickinson [1830-86]
• • “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “The truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “If I read a book and it makes my body so cold [that] no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”  {blog 4/2024}

Lillian Dickson [1901-83]
“Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way [that] you want, but you only spend it once.”  {blog 11/2013}

writer Joan Didion [1934-2021]
• • “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”  {blog 6/2012}
• • “Any compulsion tries to justify itself.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “I have already lost touch with a couple of people [that] I used to be.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication,
so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are
no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”  {blog 3/2023}

Marlene Dietrich [1901-92]
• • “I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have had.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “What a man notices first about a woman is whether she notices him.”  {blog 7/2016}
• • “It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”  {blog 8/2023}

singer-songwriter  Ani DiFranco
“Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”  {blog 6/2012}

blogger Digby {pseudonym of Heather Parton of Santa Monica, California}
“Never underestimate America's willingness to do exactly the wrong thing.”  {blog 12/2012}

Phyllis Diller [1917-2012]
“It would seem that something [that] means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely,
but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.”  {blog 12/2012}

Robert Dilts
“Flexibility comes from having multiple choices; wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives.”  {blog 7/2022}

punk rocker Mike Dirnt
“No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still
pretty much depend on the weather.”   {blog 12/2013}

Walt Disney [1901-66]
• • “All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.”  {Issue #27}
• • “It's kind of fun to do the impossible.”  {Issue #48}
• • “Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste
of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people
and hope [that] they were entertained.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “The primary purpose of any of the fine arts is to arouse a purely emotional reaction in the beholder.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “That's the real trouble with the world. Too many people grow up.”  {blog 1/2017}
• • “Laughter is America's most important export.”  {blog 5/2018}
• • “You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.”  {blog 10/2018}

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield [1804-81]
• • “Count [the minutes] by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day
and the race a life.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “The world is governed by far different personages than what is imagined by those
not behind the scenes.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know
when to forego an advantage.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “The wisdom of the ages and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.” – in the novel 'Coningsby' [1844]  {blog 3/2015}
• • “As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it.”  {blog 4/2016}
• • “Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.”  {blog 5/2018}

football coach Mike Ditka
“Living in the past is for cowards.”  {blog 10/2017}

Dorothea Dix [1802-87]
“No blessing, no good, can follow in the path trodden by slavery.”  {blog 12/2018}

assassinated Algerian writer Tahar Djaout [1954-93]
“If you are silent you are dead, / And if you speak you are dead, / So speak and die.”  {blog 8/2017}

Dusan Djukich
“Your only entitlement in life is the opportunity to make a declarative statement and live consistent with it. Don’t waste it.”  {blog 11/2017}

Theodosius Dobzansky [1900-75]
• • “There is no doubt that human survival will continue to depend more and more on human intellect
and technology. It is idle to argue whether this is good or bad. The point of no return was passed
long ago, before anyone knew [that] it was happening.”  {Issue #62}
• • “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” (in 1973)  {blog 12/2009}

TV character "Doctor Who"
• • “People assume that Time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear,
non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “I always like to do the unexpected. Takes people by surprise.” – in "Trial of The Time Lord"  {blog 7/2016}
• • “Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters but the person.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “We are all stories in the end. Just make it a good one.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “Sometimes the only choices [that] you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose.”  {blog 11/2016}
• • “The darkest day. The blackest hour. Chin up, shoulders back. Let's see what we're made of, you and I.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.”  {blog 3/2017}
• • “I am not a good man, and I'm not a bad man. I am not a hero. And I'm definitely not a president. And, no, I'm not an officer.
Do you know what I am? I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “We all change. When you think about it, we're all different people all through our lives, and that's good. You gotta keep moving,
so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”  {blog 9/2017}

writer E.L. Doctorow [1931-2015]
• • “[President Bush]'s subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone before, and . . . has created
large social constituencies ready to support the flag-waving ideals of an incremental fascism.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “[Writing] is like driving a car at night. You never see farther than your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “Technology keeps changing, but the minute any technology appears it becomes indespensible.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”  {blog 9/2013}

Charles Lutwidge Dodson {aka Lewis Carroll} [1832-98]
• • “It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “It's no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” - in "Alice"  {blog 10/2015}

former U.S. Senator Robert Joseph 'Bob' Dole
• • “I probably won't run for anything again, so I can tell the truth now.”  (2004)  {Issue #41}
• • “You can never go wrong by voting for a bill that fails, or against a bill that passes.”  {blog 7/2018}

Thomas Donahue, president of AFL-CIO
“The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.” (frequent AFL-CIO slogan)  {blog 3/2023}

poet John Donne [1572-1631]
“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never
send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”  {blog 5/2008}

animated Doogal the Dog
“The world's most fearless warrior couldn't make it today, so I came instead.”  {blog 2/2021}

The Doors band
“Keep your eyes upon the road / And your hands upon the wheel” (song lyric)  {Issue #55}

John Dos Passos [1896-1970]
“Often things [that] you think are just beginning are coming to an end.”  {blog 7/2013}

mystery author James D. Doss [1939-2012]
• • “Like virtue, adventure is its own reward.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Political correctness is merely the intellectual McCarthyism that's currently in season . . . and a pernicious poison
in the well of Reason.”  {blog 8/2017}

Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]
• • “The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.”  {Issue #22 & blog 4/2012}
• • “Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”  {blog 8/2019}

comedy writer Jack Douglas [1908-89]
“Sleep faster. We need the pillow.”  {Issue #37}

William O. Douglas [1898-1980]
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1939-75
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight
when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware
of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”  {blog 8/2009}

patriot, abolitionist & social reformer Frederick Douglass [1818-95]
• • “It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.
We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”  {Issue #58}
• • “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”  {blog 7/2015 & 8/2016}
• • “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.” - on 4 July 1852  {blog 8/2019}
• • “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.
That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.” - in December of 1860  {blog 12/2019}

Larry Dowell
“There is no answer if there is no question.”  {blog 7/2017}

Jerome Downes [1950-2009]
“Context is decisive.”  {Issue #42}

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930]
• • “Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations
that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “We can't command our love, but we can our actions.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring
than any effort of the imagination.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than
the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”  {blog 11/2015}

Theodore Dreiser [1871-1945]
“The most futile thing in this world is any attempt at exact definition of character.
All individuals are a bundle of contradictions.”  {blog 9/2013}

Peter F. Drucker [1909-2005]
• • “When you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “The most effective way to manage change successfully is to create it.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”  {blog 4/2018}

Kevin Drum
“We need to fix the climate, and we need to start yesterday.”  {blog 9/2009}

Emilie du Châtelet [1706-49]
“There is no right time for the truth.”  {Issue #55}

W.E.B. DuBois [1868-1963]
• • “Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.”  {blog 10/2017}
• • “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”  {blog 12/2018}
• • “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”  {blog 12/2024}

journalist Lou Dubose
• • “The Bush-Cheney administration [has] been the worst in modern American history – a failure at home and abroad,
[and] intellectually and financially corrupt.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “So the people have spoken, giving the finger to the Washington Consensus and electing an admitted sexual predator and proven prevaricator
so lacking in impulse control that he spent the early morning hours of one day cyberbullying a beauty pageant contestant he had once
humiliated in person. Strike up 'Hail To The Chief'.”  {blog 11/2016}

Karen Duffy
“Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball underwater.”  {blog 7/2013}

Troy Duffy
“The measure of a man is how he deals with tragedy.”  {blog 12/2009}

Georges Duhamel [1884-1966]
“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
— in "Scènes de La Vie Future" [1930]  {blog 7/2015}

actress Patty Duke [1946-2016]
“Reality is hard. It's no walk in the park, this thing called life.”  {blog 4/2016}

Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]
• • “All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “There is neither happiness or misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.”
- in "The Lady of The Camellias" [1848]  {blog 11/2016}
• • “The good is slow because going uphill; evil is fast because going downhill.”  {blog 1/2017}
• • “Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”  {blog 12/2019}

character Professor Albus Dumbledore, as written by J.K. Rowling
• • “It's not your abilities that show who you are, it's your choices.”
in "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets", 1998  {blog 9/2013}
• • “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living. And above all, all those who live without love.”
in "Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows"  {blog 5/2017}

dancer Isadora Duncan [1877-1927]
“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”  {blog 6/2016}

George Dunn
“Hope is a fine sentiment, but it's not a plan.”  {blog 2/2009}

The Durants {Will & Ariel Durant}
“If you want the present and the future to be different from the past, Spinoza tells us, study the past.
Find out the causes that made it what it was and bring different causes to bear.”  {blog 4/2013}

historian Will Durant [1885-1981]
• • “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”  {Issue #57}
• • “The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.”  {Issue #57 & blog 8/2014}
• • “Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization
if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.”  {Issue #58}
• • “It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool
enough of them to rule a large country.”  {Issue #63}
• • “To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.”  {blog 10/2021}

Marguerite Duras [1914-96]
“One does not find solitude, one creates it.”  {Issue #36}

Will Durst
“With Democrats, it's often a struggle to get them to take their own side in an argument.”  {blog 10/2007}

Geoff Dyer
“It isn't that jazz musicians die young, it's that they get older quicker.”  {blog 6/2011}

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer [1940-2015]
• • “If you change the way [that] you look at things, the things [that] you look at change.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “Conflict cannot survive without your participation.”  {blog 3/2017}
• • “Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “Abundance is not something [that] we acquire. It is something [that] we tune into.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “You cannot be lonely if you like the person [that] you're alone with.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “Let the world know why you're here, and do it with passion.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “You'll see it when you believe it.”  {blog 6/2018}

music legend Bob Dylan
• • “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’ – I might just tell you the truth.”  {Issue #49}
• • “When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and
don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.”  {Issue #50}
• • “A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night
and in between does what he wants to do.”  {blog 7/2012 & 4/2015}
• • “The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don't think they have titles.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “Anybody who comes out for peace is not for peace. Peace is the time it takes to reload your rifle.”
- in June 1986 Rolling Stone Magazine interview  {blog 6/2018}
• • “I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “So what does it all mean? . . . If a song moves you, that's all that's important. I don't have to know what a song means.”
- in his Nobel Prize response speech, June 2017  {blog 5/2022}

Esther Dyson
“Always make new mistakes.”  {blog 5/2012}

John M. Eades
“There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I'm not positive [that] I am thinking.”   {blog 10/2011}

J.W. Eagan
“Never judge a book by its movie.”  {blog 6/2011}

aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]
• • “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release
from little things, knows only the livid loneliness of fear.”  {Issue #43}
• • “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.”  {Issue #60 & blog 4/2015}
• • “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”  {blog 6/2008}
• • “The lure of flying is the lure of beauty.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.”  {blog 1/2012}
• • “The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”  {blog 2/2012}
• • “Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “Never interrupt someone doing something [that] you said couldn't be done.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “Better to do a good deed near at home than to go far away to burn incense.”  {blog 5/2012}

auto racer Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“[The Confederate flag is] offensive to an entire race.”  {blog 12/2019}

Western lawman Wyatt Earp [1848-1929]
“For my handling of the situation at Tombstone, I have no regrets. Were it to be done again,
I would do it exactly as I did it at the time.”   {blog 6/2015}

Gregg Easterbrook
“The sense of meaning [in life] is much more difficult to acquire than material possessions.”  {Issue #40}

George Eastman [1854-1932], founder of Eastman Kodak Co.
“What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are.”  {blog 7/2013}

Abba Eban [1915-2002]
“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”  {blog 4/2011}

Roger Ebert [1942-2013]
• • “We must try to contribute joy to the world. I didn't always know this and am happy [that]
I lived long enough to find it out.” (in 2011)  {blog 10/2011}
• • “We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Every great film should seem new every time [that] you see it.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Of the many imprisonments possible in this world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate – to be unable
to tell another person what you really feel.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.”
— in "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie" [2000]  {blog 7/2015}

Meister Eckhart [1260?-1328?]
• • “If the only prayer you say in your life is 'thank you' that would suffice.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.”  {blog 1/2022}

Umberto Eco [1932-2016]
• • “The basic question of philosophy . . . is the same as that of the detective novel: Who is guilty?”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “Lying about the future produces history.”  {blog 12/2008 & 1/2012}
• • “The detective novel asks the central question of philosophy: Whodunit?”  {blog 6/2016}

Dr. Dean Edell
“America has become a nation of whiners.”  {Issue #12}

Marian Wright Edelman
• • “Speak truth to power.” {after the Quakers}  {Issue #57}
• • “If we do not speak up for our children, they may not be heard. And if we don't
stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.”  {blog 4/2012}

Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]
Thomas Alva Edison Quotations Page at Working Minds
Thomas Edison Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Edward, Duke of Windsor [1894-1972]
“The thing that impresses me most about America is the way [that] parents obey their children.”   {blog 2/2011}

movie director Blake Edwards [1922-2010]
“Every time [that] I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.”  {blog 8/2013}

John Edwards
“Let's get to work!” (campaign withdrawal speech, 30 January 2008)  {blog 2/2008}

Tracey Edwards
“With Chris Wallace leaving, Homer Simpson is now the smartest person on Fox.”  {blog 1/2022}

character Eeyore (a friend of Winnie the Pooh, written by A.A. Milne [1882-1956])
• • “If anyone wants to clap, now is the time to do it.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine.”  {blog 8/2023}

Timothy Egan
“The clowns have finally taken over the circus . . . [The Republican Party] is now overwhelmed by its own nonsense.”
in The New York Times  {blog 11/2011}

Barbara Ehrenreich
“The social contract has been totally violated and shredded – at least the social contract as I understood it, which was
'Work hard. Hard work will get you ahead'. If that doesn't work, then what's the deal?”  {Issue #12}
(from "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" [2001])

Paul R. Ehrlich
“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb
on which it is perched.”  {Issue #46}

William S. Eidelman, MD
“[Marijuana] is safer than aspirin, which kills thousands every year.”  {blog 1/2008}

Gustave Eiffel [1832-1923]
“The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined
by a perfect appropriateness to its use.”  {blog 1/2017}

Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
Albert Einstein Quotations Page at Working Minds
Albert Einstein Page at Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Gen. Dwight D. 'Ike' Eisenhower [1890-1969]
34th President of the United States, 1953-61
• • “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out
of their way and let them have it.”  {Issue #62}
• • “Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges
of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation
more than its wealth.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “Every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my Administration. We kept the peace.
People asked how it happened. By god, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes
of its children.”, on 16 April 1953  {blog 6/2012}
• • “Never waste a minute thinking about people [that] you don't like.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “Learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”  {blog 7/2017}
• • “Here in America we are descended in blood and spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dared dissent
from accepted doctrine. May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”  {blog 3/2018}
• • “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.”  {blog 3/2018}
• • “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”  {blog 5/2018}
• • “Only a fool would try to deprive men and women of their right to join a union of their choice.”  {blog 9/2018 & 10/2018}
• • “Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”  {blog 12/2019}
• • “Don't join the book burners ... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”  {blog 11/2020}

Hanns Eisler [1898-1962]
“He who knows only music understands nothing about it.”  {Issue #67}

Charles W. Eliot [1834-1926]
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors,
and the most patient of teachers.”  {blog 10/2017}

George Eliot [1819-80]
• • “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other
in silent unspeakable memories.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “. . . if I were a bird / I would fly about the Earth / seeking the successive autumns”  {blog 10/2021}

poet Thomas Stearns 'T.S.' Eliot [1888-1965]
• • “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.”  {Issue #59 & blog 6/2008}
• • “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”   {blog 10/2009}
• • “Those who say [that] they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste
and end by debauching it.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  {blog 9/2012 & 3/2014}
• • “Half of the harm done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is
where we start from.” (in the 1942 poem "Little Gidding")  {blog 12/2013}

Duke Ellington [1899-1974]
“By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your
daughter to associate with.”   {blog 7/2008}

Edwin Elliot
“By being yourself, you put something wonderful in[to] the world that was not there before.”  {blog 4/2018}

Larry Elliott, economics editor at The London Guardian
“It is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets [in America], given the
gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.”  {blog 10/2008}

sci-fi author Harlan Ellison [1934-2018]
• • “Here's the best truth [that] I know for certain: Never attribute to 'evil' that which
you can chalk up to ineptitude.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”  {blog 7/2018}
• • “The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “Art is not supposed to be easier! There are a lot of things in life that are supposed to be easier . . . but not Art. Art should always
be tough. Art should demand something of you. Art should involve foot-pounds of energy being expended.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them.”  {blog 11/2020}

writer Ralph Ellison [1914-94]
• • “I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “It's impossible not to take advantage of the people. The trick is to take advantage of them
in their own best interest.”  {blog 2/2012}

whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg [1931-2023]
• • “There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right.”  {blog 11/2015}
• • “I agree that there are things that should be kept secret.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “Look, all administrations, all governments lie, all officials lie and nothing they say is to be believed.
That's a pretty good rule.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers
that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “I think about nuclear war not because I find it fascinating but because I want to prevent it, to make it unthinkable.” - in 2023  {blog 8/2023}

transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotations Page at Working Minds
Ralph Waldo Emerson Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

theologian Nathaniel Emmons [1745-1840]
“Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.”  {blog 7/2013}

inventor Douglas Engelbart [1925-2013]
“The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”  {blog 11/2014}

Friedrich Engels [1820-95]
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”  {Issue #25}

Brian Eno
“Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.”  {blog 8/2013}

Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
• • “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut out the last two chapters.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house
is happy to see you.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “Never marry a man [that] you wouldn't want to be divorced from.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered,
someone else would do it for you.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”  {blog 7/2022}

Epictetus [55?–135? C.E.], Stoic philosopher & crippled former slave
• • “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”  {Issue #50}
• • “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen
as they do happen, and your life will go well.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Be careful to leave your sons well-instructed rather than rich, for the hopes
of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “Nature has given us one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “To live a life free from sorrow, think of what is going to happen as if it had already happened.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself, you should say: 'He obviously does not know me
very well, since there are so many other faults [that] he could have mentioned.'”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.”  {blog 5/2018}

Epicurus [341?–270? B.C.E.]
• • “Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “I've never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He
both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful.
If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good.
If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?”  {blog 7/2021}

Joseph Epstein
“If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses.”  {blog 2/2014}

Desiderius Erasmus [1466-1536]
• • “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." [In regione caecorum rex est luscus.]  {blog 1/2011}
• • “When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food & clothes.”  {blog 7/2016}

philosopher Werner Erhard
Werner Erhard Quotations Page at Working Minds
philosopher Werner Erhard Page at Working Minds

evangelical conservative commentator Erick Erickson
“[Marjorie Taylor Greene] is bat-shit crazy. But she’s going to Congress.” - during her first campaign  {blog 1/2022}

Ernestine character, as portrayed by comedian Lily Tomlin
“If I revealed who I'm dating right now it would swing the election {snort, snort}.” - live in-character interview 1984  {blog 2/2019}

Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times columnist
• • “In Los Angeles, all lanes are fast lanes.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Middle age is that point in life when you realize [that] patience is a weapon.”  {Issue #52}

Congresswoman Veronica Escobar [Dem TX-16]
“Republicans are using every dirty trick in the books to stem the tide of democracy and cling to power.”  {blog 1/2022}

radio & print journalist Richard 'R.J.' Eskow
• • “This election wasn't just a failure for Democrats. It was a failure for democracy.” – in November 2014  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Immigrants don’t steal jobs or wages. Billionaires do.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “[If] Trump’s plan for managing his businesses while he’s in the Oval Office . . . doesn’t amount to premeditated corruption,
it certainly paves the way for it.” - in January 2017  {blog 2/2017}

Euripedes [circa 480 B.C.E. – 406 B.C.E.]
“Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”  {blog 11/2010}

Richard L. Evans [1906-71]
“Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.”  {blog 10/2016}

Western author Tabor Evans {real name Harry Whittington} [1915–89]
“Is there no place safe from the white man?”  {blog 4/2011}

Edward Everett [1794-1865]
“Education is a better guard of liberty than a standing army.”  {blog 10/2008}

Helen Exley
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled 'This could change your life'.”  {blog 8/2015}

educator Henry B. Eyring
“Whenever you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble – and you will be right more than half the time.”  {blog 12/2019}

Douglas Fairbanks [1883-1939]
• • “Indeed it is possible to stand with one foot on the inevitable 'banana peel' of life with both eyes peering into the Great Beyond,
and still be happy, comfortable, and serene – if we will even so much as smile.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “The man that's out to do something has to keep in high gear all the time.”  {blog 6/2016}

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. [1909-2000]
• • “I had no particular desire to be a personality like my father, nor was I equipped to be one. I was determined to be my own man,
although having the Fairbanks name did make it easier to get into an office to see someone.”  {blog 7/2016}
• • “I was only saying to the Queen the other day how I hate name dropping.”  {blog 8/2016}

William Falk, editor-in-chief at "The Week Magazine"
• • “[Paul Ryan is] a supply-side zealot who would shred the safety net to put more money in the pockets of the very rich.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “In recent weeks, there's been an avalanche of evidence of our species' bottomless capacity for stupidity, savagery, and tribal hatred. An alarming
number of our existing and would-be leaders have shown themselves to be clueless, corrupt, self-serving scoundrels and buffoons.”  {blog 11/2016}

journalist James Fallows
“What looks like tomorrow's problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around.”  {blog 3/2012}

TV evangelist Jerry Falwell 1933-2007]
“You do not determine a man's greatness by his talent or wealth, as the world does, but rather by
what it takes to discourage him.”  {blog 8/2015}

writer John Fante [1909-83]
“Don't be bitter.”  {Issue #39}

Michael Faraday [1791-1867]
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”  {Issue #42}

Thomas Farber
“A writer is someone who finishes.”  {blog 6/2015}

Alistair Farrugia
“Freedom is when the people speak. Democracy is when the government listens.”  {blog 11/2007}

Farnaz Fassahi, Wall Street Journal correspondent
“Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster . . . a foreign policy failure bound
to haunt the United States for decades.” (in a personal email later made public by a recipient)  {Issue #47}

R.W. Fassbinder
“It is only when we realize that everything is pointless that we can act fearlessly.”  {Issue #36}

Wm. Faulkner [1897-1962]
Wm. Faulkner Quotations Page at Working Minds
Wm. Faulkner Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Ron Faust
“Is living well the best revenge? No: revenge is the best revenge.”  {Issue #60}

Jeff Faux, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute
“[The World Trade Organization's] constitution of the world economy protects just one class
of global citizen – the corporate investor.”  {Issue #66}

William Feather
“Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”  {blog 6/2008}

U.S. Federal Trade Commission
“For Business Opportunity Sellers, ‘A.I.’ Stands for ‘Allegedly Inaccurate’” - blog post headline, 8/2023  {blog 8/2023}

'The Federalist' Papers [1787-88]
“It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” — Federalist Paper #1  {blog 2/2021}

Russ Feingold, 2016 candidate for U.S. Senate from Wisconsin
• • “It's time for Congress to go cold turkey and stop feeding at the lobbyist-funded trough.”   {blog 4/2010}
• • “As a country, as a state, and as communities, we need to work hard to make sure [that] our veterans get the care [that] they deserve, and a path
open to them toward a brighter future . . . and I pledge to continue to fight for them and their families – not just today, but every day.”  {blog 11/2015}

Michael Feldman
“Before Osama, [Dubya] let Sosa get away.” on What D'ya Know?" radio program  {Issue #55}

Federico Fellini [1920-93]
• • “Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.”
— line in "Fellini's 8½" [1963]  {Issue #70}
• • “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”  {blog 9/2012 & 7/2015}
• • “A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “At the end of the day, cinema is an art form being, at the same time, a circus, a voyage to our souls, a mirage,
and an illusion of life itself.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”  {blog 9/2017}

Edna Ferber [1885-1968]
• • “Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover
until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”  {blog 5/2008 & 11/2008}

Malcolm Ferguson, assistant editor at The Atlantic Magazine [est. 1857]
“All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.”  {blog 7/2024}

Lawrence Ferlinghetti [b. 1919]
“Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore,
I feel like telling him [that] he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.”  {blog 3/2013}

Geraldine Ferraro [1935-2011]
“Ask not what America can do for women, but ask what women can do for America.”  {blog 1/2012}

Reginald Fessenden [1866-1932]
“All our civilization is based on invention; before invention, men lived on fruits and nuts and pine cones and slept in caves.”  {blog 5/2016}

philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach [1804-72]
“Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority,
the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”  {blog 8/2012}

comic actress Tina Fey
• • “If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “Confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “Say yes, and you'll figure it out afterward.”  {blog 12/2017}

Paul K. Feyerabend [1924-94]
• • “Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is rather an ever-increasing ocean of mutually
incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths.”  {blog 8/2019}
• • “All religion may be centered around a generally good idea; however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “Science is only one of the many instruments [that] people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible,
and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own.”  {blog 2/2021}
• • “The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.”  {blog 10/2021}

physicist Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]
• • “Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason [that] we are doing it.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not
really there, but to comprehend those things which ARE there.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “A great deal more is known than has been proved.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” (in 1965)  {blog 9/2011}
• • “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”  {blog 2/2012}
• • “God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things
that you do not understand.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • {last words} “I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.”
— as quoted in the biography "Genius"  {blog 5/2012}
• • “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for Nature cannot be fooled.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree
with experiment, it's wrong.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”  {blog 10/2017}
• • “The universe is not complicated. There's just a lot of it.”  {blog 7/2018}

literary critic Leslie Fiedler [1917-2003]
“There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.”  {blog 10/2021}

W.C. Fields [1879-1946]
• • “You can fool half of the people all of the time and that's enough to make a good living.”  {Issue #26}
• • “Start every day with a smile and get it over with.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”  {blog 12/2024}

explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes
“There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”  {blog 12/2011}

rapper 50 Cent
“Always have bail money.”  {blog 1/2013}

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink
“Often in life, the most important question [that] we can ask ourselves is: Do we really have the problem
[that] we think we have?”   {blog 3/2015}

John Finley
“Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty.”  {blog 4/2011}

Carly Fiorina
“The highest calling of leadership is to unlock the potential of others.”  {blog 9/2015}

Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter columnist
“Nothing gets done in the United States because it's the right thing to do; it gets done because
it's the profitable thing to do.”  {blog 2/2011}

actress & author Carrie Fisher [1956-2016]
“Sometimes you can only find heaven by slowly backing away from hell.”  {blog 12/2017}

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]
F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotations Page
F. Scott Fitzgerald Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

novelist Penelope Fitzgerald [1916-2000]
“It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren't quite the right people for each other.”  {blog 2/2014}

Zelda Fitzgerald [1900-48]
• • “It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”  {blog 5/2015}

writer-actress April Fitzsimmons
“All I want for Christmas is the truth.”  {Issue #66}

actor Paul Fix [1901-83]
“The only reason [that] some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.”  {blog 4/2012}

Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]
• • “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness
– though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”  {blog 11/2008 & 8/2023}
• • “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original
in your work.” - in 1876  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose
of instruction. No, read in order to live.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Talent is a long patience, and originality and effort of will and intense observation.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “What an elder sees sitting, the young can't see standing.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Of all lies, art is the least untrue.” - in a letter dated 1846  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Le seul moyen de guérir, c'est de se considérer comme guéri. {The only way to heal is to consider yourself cured.}”  {blog 6/2018}

Ian L. Fleming [1908-64], creator of Agent 007 James Bond
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” - in "Goldfinger"  {Issue #43}

activist Arthur A. Fletcher [1924-2005]
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  {Issue #62}

Fernando Flores
• • “Every company of the future is going to be in the business of exquisite care.”  {Issue #31}
• • “The compassion of the strong is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Hope is the raw material of losers.”  {blog 1/2012}

actor Errol Flynn [1909-59]
• • “It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “I would rather take the chance and lose than to admit to myself that I didn't have the courage to try. I'd rather make a hundred mistakes,
and take the consequences for every one, than to grovel in the dirt because fear had its foot on my neck.”  {blog 12/2019}

John Fogg of North Garden, VA
“No amount of trouble outside the home can crush you if things are right at home; and no amount of success outside the home
can satisfy you if things aren’t right at home.”  {blog 1/2022}

blogger Ferguson Foont
“Rich people don't create jobs. Jobs create rich people. The republi-cons moan, the republi-cons bitch.
Our rich are too poor and our poor are too rich.”  {blog 9/2015 & 7/2021}

Malcolm Forbes [1919-90]
• • “There's never enough time, unless you're serving it.”  {Issue #37}
• • “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”  {blog 10/2011}
• • “If you have a job without aggravations, [then] you don't have a job.”  {blog 9/2015}

Forbes Magazine
“Google Users - You're The Product, Not The Customer” - 12/2013 article  {blog 4/2018}

Bill Ford, chairman of Ford Motor Company
“The purpose of any company should be to make people's lives better. Otherwise, they shouldn't exist.”  {blog 9/2017}

Gerald Ford [1913-2006]
“A government big enough to give you everything [that] you want is a government big enough
to take from you, everything [that] you have.”  {blog 8/2012}

business tycoon Henry Ford [1863-1947]
• • “History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only
history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history [that] we make today.” (in 1916)  {blog 10/2008}
• • “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Whether you think you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if
they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find [that] he can do what he was afraid
[that] he couldn't do.”  {blog 7/2011 & 2/2017}
• • “Obstacles are those frightful things [that] you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “Quality means do it right when no one is looking.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”  {blog 7/2024}

Richard Ford
“Nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to f*ck up your whole life.”  {blog 12/2007}

Tom Ford
“Time and silence are the most luxurious things today.”  {blog 3/2016}

motivational speaker Marie Forleo
“Success doesn’t come from what you do occasionally. It comes from what you do consistently.”  {blog 7/2021}

journalist Rana Foroohar, associate editor at "Financial Times"
• • “The business of corporate America is no longer business – it is finance.” - Financial Times article, 2016  {blog 5/2016}
• • “There is now research showing that in advanced economies two-thirds of the population are now on the track
to be poorer than their parents.” - in 2020  {blog 10/2021}

British author E.M. Forster [1879-1970]
• • “One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.”
– in the Preface to "A Passage To India" [1924 novel]  {blog 7/2016}
• • “One always tends to over-praise a long book because one has got through it.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “Unless we remember we cannot understand.”  {blog 10/2017}
• • “We must be willing to let go of the life [that] we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”  {blog 2/2019}

English author Frederick Forsyth
“Behind his mask, the writer is always watching; he cannot help it. He observes, analyzes, takes mental notes,
stores nuggets of the talk and behavior around him for later use.”  {blog 10/2015}

Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-1969]
• • “Liberty is always dangerous, but the safest thing [that] we have.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted
by someone doing it.” in the 1940s  {blog 2/2014}

Caxton C. Foster
“A camel is a horse designed by a committee and an elephant is a mouse built to military specifications.”  {blog 10/2009}

Michel Foucault [1926-84]
• • “Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is
the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does.”  {blog 4/2024}

novelist John Fowles [1926-2005]
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”  {blog 9/2018}

Jeff Foxworthy
“I'm getting ready to be a parent. I just turned 30, and I'm tired of mowing the grass.”  {blog 12/2012}

Anatole France [1844-1924]
• • “We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal.”  {Issue #26}
• • “The law in its wisdom allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges over the Seine.”  {Issue #68}
• • “In Art, as in love, instinct is enough.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “If the path be beautiful, let us not question where it leads.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “Some succeed because they are destined to; most succeed because they are determined to.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “We do not know what to do with this short life, but we want another which will be eternal.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” – "Le Lys Rouge", 1894  {blog 8/2013}
• • “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “Ignorance is the necessary condition of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence for a single hour.”
- in "The Garden of Epicurus", 1894  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”  {blog 6/2019 & 11/2020}

Brendan Francis
“True, you can't take money with you; but then, that's not the place
where it comes in handy.”  {Issue #38}

mystery author Dick Francis [1920-2010]
“The only real hell is on earth, and usually undeserved.” – in "To The Hilt"  {blog 12/2007}

Pope Francis [elected March 2013]
• • “Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God
has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude . . . But when we exploit Creation we destroy
the sign of God’s love for us, in destroying Creation we are saying to God: ‘I don’t like it! This is not good!’ ‘So what do you like?’ ‘I like myself!’ – Here,
this is sin! Do you see?” - September 2015  {blog 9/2015}
• • “In Buenos Aires, mothers say to me, 'My son is 34 and he's not getting married; I don't know what to do'.
So I tell them, 'Don't iron their shirts anymore'.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Being homosexual isn't a crime . . . It's not a crime. Yes, but it's a sin. Fine, but first let's distinguish between a sin and a crime.
It's also a sin to lack charity with one another.”- denouncing laws against homosexuality in an AP interview  {blog 3/2023}

St. Francis of Assisi [1181?-1226]
“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”  {blog 4/2018}

Anne Frank [1929-45]
• • “No one has ever become poor by giving.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”  {blog 2/2016}

Thomas C. Frank
“The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice'
or 'service' or universal affluence.” - in "One Market Under God"  {Issue #14 & blog 4/2009}

Justice Felix Frankfurter [1882-1965]
“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”  {blog 3/2013}

Viktor Frankl [1905-97]
• • “What is to give light must endure burning.”  {Issue #24}
• • “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “The last freedom is choosing your attitude.”  {blog 6/2012}
• • “Everything can be taken from a man but . . . the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”  {blog 2/2018}

music legend Aretha Franklin [1942-2018]
• • “People really don't have to give you anything, so appreciate what people give you.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It's our basic human right.”  {blog 9/2018}

Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]
Benjamin Franklin Quotations Page at Working Minds
Independence Hall Assn. 'Electric Franklin' website [est. 1999]

Steve Fraser
“Somehow, plutocracy has furtively triumphed over democracy.”  {blog 7/2008}

Ian Frazier
“Kindness is a folding chair / We carry with us everywhere.” - in The New Yorker Magazine, January 2022  {blog 5/2022}

boxing champion Joe Frazier [1944-2011]
“Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.”  {blog 12/2011}

"Frazz" syndicated comic strip [est. 2001], as drawn by Jef Mallett
• • “What if the fourth time's the charm and we've just been settling thus far?”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “I like the human spirit; not so fond of human nature.”  {blog 10/2022}

Frederick the Great [1740-86]
“The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in the world is to discover new truths;
and the next is to shake off old prejudices.”  {Issue #45}

David French, contributing writer at The Atlantic Magazine
“When it’s all been said or done, did we live for truth or for treasure?”  {blog 1/2023}

Jessie Benton Frémont [1824-1902]
“Unexplained joy is always so keen that . . . it seems to hold enough to reconcile one to the inevitable.”  {blog 3/2020}

futurist Jacque Fresco [1916-2017]
“When somebody asks, 'What's the answer to all of these questions?' that's absurd. There is no answer, there are answers,
along the way.”  {blog 7/2017}

Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]
• • “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men,
with a few exceptions, are worthless.”   {blog 11/2008}
• • “Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “Love and work, work and love . . . that's all there is.”  {blog 4/2017}

Alexis Fridman, a third-grader who co-founded a Kids Against Trump group
“If I talked like Donald Trump, I’d get sent to the principal’s office immediately.”  {blog 7/2016}

Betty Friedan [1921-2006]
“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”  {blog 8/2016}

Kinky Friedman
• • “An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.”  {blog 6/2012}
• • “How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design?”  {blog 6/2015}

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman [1912-2006]
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are
taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”  {blog 9/2016}

Thomas L. Friedman
“Democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities,
but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy cannot take root.”  {blog 9/2013}

Erich Fromm [1900-80]
• • “The capacity to be puzzled is indeed the premise of all creation, be it in art or science.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.”  {blog 12/2023}

David Frost
“Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people [that] you wouldn't have [there].”   {blog 8/2012}

poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]
• • “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.”  {Issue #50}
• • “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “Home is the place where, when you go there / They have to take you in”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “In three words I can sum up everything about life: It goes on.”  {blog 10/2010 & 4/2024}
• • “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”  {blog 1/2011}
• • “The best way out is always through.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Peace is something that you only get by war or the threat of war, however tacit the threat.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Freedom lies in being bold.”  {blog 3/2017}
• • “I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition
of your life; define yourself.”  {blog 4/2024}

journalist David Frum, writer for The Atlantic Magazine
• • “[Michael D.] Cohen’s testimony may not all prove correct. But all of it is plausible – and not a word of it
has been contradicted, let alone refuted.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “There will be no recovery from this crisis until the Republican Party recommits itself to democracy.”  {blog 1/2022}

Edward Fry of Laguna Beach, California
“The atrocity is not Haditha, it is the [Iraq] war.”  {Issue #62}

Stephen Fry
“You can't just say [that] there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.”  {blog 10/2017}

Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
“I would agree with Luis Buñuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”  {blog 2/2010}

John Fugelsang
“1984: if libs say Reaganomics will destroy the middle class, call'em commies. 2014: if the middle class has been destroyed, blame the libs.”  {blog 1/2018}

U.S. Senator  J. William Fulbright [1905-95]
• • “Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power – the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission – which has affected, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing, we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world; the measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent. And, in a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Accusations of unpatriotism drenched in scorn are a means of stopping debates, not of starting them.”  {blog 7/2021}

visionary R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]
R. Buckminster Fuller Quotations Page at Working Minds
R. Buckminster Fuller Page at Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Thomas Fuller [1608-61]
• • “Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”  {blog 4/2014}

Roy Fultun
“Go ye forth and share.”  {Issue #55}

'Funky Winkerbean' comic strip, as drawn by Tom Batiuk
• • “Life is like a roll of masking tape - it goes a lot faster toward the end.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “If Jesus or anyone else is coming, they'd better step on it, because the way [that] things are going
there may not be anyone here to meet them.”  {blog 1/2018}

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