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

Page Six

Rick Santorum
“I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute . . . To say that people
of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up.”  {blog 3/2012}
“Rick Santorum makes me want to throw up.” ~~ Spokane, Washington blogger 'duroc'  {blog 3/2012}

journalist Bill Saporito
“In the halls of politics and power, most economists are like wallpaper – full of intricate details but ultimately decoration.”  {blog 2/2017}

Nobel-laureate novelist José Saramago [1922-2010]
“It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking.”  {blog 10/2017}

French artist Vincent Sardon
“My work simply reflects the world, which seems to have been created by an absolute moron.”  {blog 11/2017}

Greg Sargent, Washington Post columnist
“Trump’s incompetence will not save us from his malevolence.”  {blog 10/2017}

broadcast pioneer David Sarnoff [1891-1971]
“Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”  {blog 5/2016}

Robert W. Sarnoff [1919-97]
“Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.”  {blog 11/2009}

author William Saroyan [1908-81]
• • “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception
would be made in my case. Now what?”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with
everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy – the good and
great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer
is a rebel who never stops.”  in "The William Saroyan Reader", 1958   {blog 7/2008}

American poet May Sarton [1912-95]
• • “Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”  {blog 1/2017 & 3/2018}
• • “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”  {blog 12/2019}
• • “Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”  {blog 7/2022}
also attributed to author John Le Carré [1931-2020]
• • “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”  {blog 7/2024}

fRENCH philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]
• • “If you're lonely while you're alone, you're in bad company.”  {Issue #39}
• • “Hell is other people at breakfast.”  {Issue #62}
• • “You have to choose: live or tell stories.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “To me, philosophy is everything. It is the way [that] one lives.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us
and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul
of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream . . . God is dead.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you.”  {blog 3/2017}
• • “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”  {blog 10/2022}

Crispin Sartwell
“No large institution values independent thought, and public schools actively despise and punish it; they demand and attempt
to enforce and reward mindless obedience.”  {blog 2/2014}

Abraham Sategh
“Under Bush, no violent acts against the U.S. have occurred since 9/11. But the cost has been
a legal and spiritual 9/11 every day since.” - Time Magazine Letters, 12/2008  {blog 2/2009}

David 'Mudcat' Saunders, campaign advisor to John Edwards in 2007
“The Democratic Party's biggest problem is [that] we can't count, and the Republicans can.”  {blog 2/2008}

British historian Frances Stonor Saunders
“We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are.”  {blog 12/2017}

Elizabeth Savage
“It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.”  {blog 6/2012}

Michael Savage
“Two of the hallmarks of the psychotic are egotism and the need to destroy.” { oblivious to the irony of describing himself }  {blog 12/2024}

British statesman George Savile, Marquess of Halifax [1633-95]
• • “When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”  {blog 7/2021}

Kodo Sawaki Roshi [1880-1965]
“Even funnier than watching the monkeys at the zoo is observing these humans on the loose.”  {blog 10/2016}

British mystery author  Dorothy L. Sayers [1893-1957]
• • “How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive continuity of ducks.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “There's nothing [that] you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • [on sexual politics] “A desire to have all of the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery
of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.”  {blog 3/2015}

John Sayles
“When I was really young I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.”  {blog 10/2012}

Antonin Scalia [1936-2016]
“A man who has made no enemies is probably not a very good man.”  {blog 6/2016}

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s former communications director
“[Trump's] going after me on his Twitter account was sort of the end for me. A sign of full-blown demagoguery, as if Roy Cohn
and Joe McCarthy got together and had a baby and it ended up being Donald Trump.”  {blog 12/2019}

Scarecrow in animated Oz movie
“I have a plan: RUUUNNN!”  {blog 4/2014}

Jason Schaefer, computer consultant in Santa Fe, New Mexico
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying
[that] you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”  {blog 1/2017}

John Sheirer
“Future historians will have to end every paragraph about Trump with the disclaimer, "Seriously, no kidding,
he really said that shit.” - on Facebook  {blog 12/2019}

Jonathan Schell
“The war in Iraq is a colossol blood-drenched fraud.”  {Issue #64}

Bo Schembechler [1929-2006], football coach at the University of Michigan
“Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information
[that] you had at the time, there’s no need to fret about it. If it fails, you’ll know what to do next time.”  {blog 5/2020}

freelance columnist Bill Scher
“Until conservatives admit [that] their deepest beliefs regarding taxes and deregulation were, at minimum, severely challenged by the failures
of the [George W.] Bush presidency, they are going to have a hard time convincing anyone that they know how to run a country.”  {blog 5/2013}

Elsa Schiaparelli [1890-1973]
“Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely
to goodwill and happy companionship.”   {blog 12/2013}

André Schiffrin
“McCarthyism has not disappeared from the American scene.” (in 2008)  {blog 12/2008}

Mary Schmich, columnist for the Chicago Tribune
“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”  {blog 10/2016}

German academic & politician Carlo Schmid [1896-1979]
“We must have the courage to be intolerant of those who take advantage of democracy in order to destroy it.” - in 1948  {blog 11/2016}

Gavin A. Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
“We're no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future. It's here. It's now.” - in February 2019  {blog 2/2019}

Bruce Schneier
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking [that] you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product.
Its customers are the advertisers.”- quoted in TIME Magazine 11/2010  {blog 4/2018}

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]
• • “All truth passes thru three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed,
and third it is accepted as self-evident.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Talent hits a target [that] no one can hit; genius hits a target [that] no one can see.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “The first 40 years of life give us the text; the next 30 supply the commentary.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it
before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Politeness is an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.”  {blog 11/2016}
• • “Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted
that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.”  {blog 8/2023}

Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger [1887-1961]
“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.”  {blog 10/2022}

Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert [1797-1828]
“I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.”  {blog 1/2014}

radio talk show host & TV reporter Ed Schultz [1954-2018]
• • “The only place they can shoot you when you are out in front is in the back.”  {Issue #58}
• • “Too bad. The rocks go with the farm.”  {Issue #60}

cartoonist Charles M. Schulz [1922-2000]
• • “Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”  {blog 2/2019}

German composer Robert Schumann [1810-56]
“He who is too eager to preserve his originality is already losing it.”   {blog 4/2013}

Joseph Schumpeter [1883-1950]
“Even if you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough people
long enough to do irreversible damage.”  {blog 8/2009}

Carl Schurz [1829-1906]
“My country, right or wrong; when right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.”  {blog 9/2012}

Peter W. Schutz
“Hire character. Train skill.”  {blog 3/2017}

investor Charles Schwab
“The way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.”  {blog 8/2017}

Evan I. Schwartz
“The conventional view of inventors is [that] they're good at solving problems.
It's really finding problems.”  {Issue #52}

movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor of California, 2003-2011
• • “Money is da most important thing.”
[at his first political press conference, 6 August 2003]  {Issue #35}
• • “There are no shortcuts. Everything is reps, reps, reps.”  {blog 11/2017}

Albert Schweitzer [1875-1965]
• • “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy
are those who have sought and found how to serve.”  {blog 6/2018}

book critic George Scialabba
• • “Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable
to superstition and demagoguery.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.”  {blog 5/2016}

Leonardo Sciascia [1921-89]
“Even true things shouted from loudspeakers start to sound like lies.”  {blog 12/2008}

Martin Scorsese
“There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.”  {blog 7/2010}

C.P. Scott [1846-1932]
editor & owner of U.K.'s Manchester Guardian newspaper
• • “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”  {blog 7/2016}
• • “Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer harm.”  {blog 8/2017}

Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]
• • “Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!” - in the 1808 poem "Marmion"  {blog 5/2009}
• • “One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry
decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.”  {blog 7/2016}
• • “For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime
than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.”  {blog 1/2023}

T.L. Scrutton
“In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.”   {blog 4/2015}

Frank Scully
“Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?”  {blog 6/2012}

sportscaster Vin Scully [b. 1927]
“Good is not good when better is expected.”  {blog 10/2021}

David Sedaris
“The size of a planet doesn't strike until you start looking for something.”  {blog 7/2013}

radio & podcast show host Sam Seder
• • “The Republican Party is in a death spiral.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “Depending on which economist you talk to these [sequester] cuts will either really hurt the economy or
really, really hurt the economy.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “[Donald] Trump is a virus that the Republican Party has no immunity from because he actually represents everything that
the party stands for, from anti-immigrant hysteria to worship of plutocrat 'job creators'.” – in 2015  {blog 7/2015}

folksinger & activist Pete Seeger [1919-2014]
• • “It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people [that] you disagree with.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “All of us, we're links in a chain. And if we do our job right, there will be many, many links to come.”  {blog 12/2015}

songwriter Bob Seger
“Set yourself the bolder course.”  {Issue #55}

Jerry Seinfeld
• • “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence [that] we have that people are still thinking.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.”  {blog 10/2015}

Hubert Selby, Jr. [1928-2004]
“Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got.”  {Issue #43}

George Seldes [1890-1995]
“Tell the truth and run.”  {Issue #36}

Dr. Martin Seligman
“So many Americans build their lives around pursuing pleasure. It turns out that engagement
and meaning are much more important components of happiness.”  {Issue #50}

David Seltzer
“There are two types of Republicans, the rich and the stupid. The rich ones strive to keep the stupid ones stupid
and the stupid ones strive to keep the rich ones rich.”  {blog 5/2015}

movie mogul David O. Selznick [1902-65]
“Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names.”  {blog 4/2009}

Audry J. Seman of Copper Center, Alaska
“Truth should put a light in your eyes and a skip in your step.”  {Issue #11}

Maurice Sendak [1928-2012]
• • “I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person,
so [that] I can have judgment and taste and whatever.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • “Inside all of us is hope. Inside all of us is fear. Inside all of us is adventure. Inside all of us is . . . a Wild Thing.”
– in "Where The Wild Things Are" [1963]  {blog 8/2016}

Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]
• • “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by rulers as useful.”  {Issue #36}
• • DUCUNT VOLENTUM FATA, NOLENTUM TRAHUNT:
"Fate leads those who are willing; the unwilling it drags.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”  {blog 5/2009}
• • “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
(recently quoted by J.K. Rowling)  {blog 4/2015}
• • “The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”  {blog 3/2017}
• • AB HONESTO VIRUM BONUM NIHIL DETERRET: “Nothing deters a good man from doing what is honorable.”  {blog 10/2017}
• • “He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “The point is not to wish for these adversities, but for the virtue that makes adversities bearable.”  {blog 3/2020}
• • “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and be understood.”  {blog 8/2023}
• • “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”  {blog 7/2024}

Victor Serebriakoff [1912-2000], co-founder of American Mensa
“Intelligence is no guarantee against being stupid.”  {Issue #36}

television writer Rod Serling [1924-75]
• • “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout.
There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search
for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own.”  {Issue #63}
• • “It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every
twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”  {Issue #64}
• • “Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming [that] the audience
is any less intelligent than you are.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable
made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.”  {blog 2/2016}
• • “Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes
one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”  {blog 7/2021}

Inia Seruiratu, Fiji's Minister for Defense
“In our blue Pacific continent, machine guns, fighter jets, gray ships, and green battalions are not our primary security concern.
The single greatest threat to our very existence is climate change.”  {blog 7/2022}

Michael Servetus [1509?-1553], burned at the stake as a heretic
“To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.”   {blog 9/2013}

writer Robert W. Service [1874-1958]
“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead
that wears you out - it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”  {blog 8/2017}

Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine
“There will be more Derek Chauvins, because his conviction alters nothing (about the American system of policing).”  {blog 7/2021}

Cynthia Propper Seton
“In America, to look a couple of years younger than you actually are is not only an achievement
for which you are to be congratulated, it is patriotic.”  {blog 6/2008}

Dr. Seuss {real name Theodor Geisel} [1904-91]
• • “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.”  {blog 9/2008}
{ probably said first by American financier & statesman Bernard M. Baruch [1870-1965] }
• • “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
— in "The Lorax", 1971  {blog 9/2012}
• • “Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . Get on your way!”
— in "Oh, The Places You'll Go", 1990  {blog 9/2013}
• • “The more that you read, / the more things you will know. / The more that you learn, / the more places you'll go!”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “A person's a person, no matter how small.” - in "Horton Hears A Who"  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Today you are you / That is truer than true / There is no one alive / Who is youer than you”
– in "Happy Birthday To You!" [1959]  {blog 8/2016}
• • “Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”  {blog 6/2019}

Linda Sexson
“Art is the work that is play.”  {Issue #52}

Anne Sexton [1928-74]
• • “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”  {blog 10/2017}

Gene Seymour, Newsday critic
“These may indeed be the days of miracle and wonder, but we're still just
as f*cked-up-and-full-of-it as we always were.”  {Issue #71}

British playwright Sir Peter Shaffer [1926-2016]
“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”  {blog 6/2017}

'Billy Bob' Shakespeare
“Farting is such sweet sorrow.”  {blog 1/2017}

Nick Shakespeare
“They failed because they did not start with a dream.”  {blog 3/2012}

Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
Wm. Shakespeare Quotations Page at Working Minds
Wm. Shakespeare Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

pop star Shakira
“In this country, everything is possible.”  {blog 11/2011}

Tupac Shakur [1971-96]
“Don't believe everything [that] you hear . . . Real eyes realize real lies.”  {blog 11/2017}

Gary Shandling [1949-2016]
“My friends tell me [that] I have an intimacy problem. But they don't really know me.”  {blog 4/2017}

mystery author Dell Shannon
pen name of Elizabeth Linington [1921-88]
“[Organized religion] is the most successful con game ever put over on the human race. You'd think
we'd have seen thru it in a quarter of a million years or so, but most people never seem to.”  {Issue #39}

Rev. Al Sharpton
“The middle class built America. It's time for America to rebuild the middle class.”  {blog 4/2012}

actor William Shatner
“I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it,
relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”  {blog 1/2023}

Artie Shaw [1910-2004]
“People are entitled to be judged by their best . . . because everything else is accidents that happen along the way.
When a guy does something important, he deserves credit because it's hard to do. You do it in spite of the world.”  {Issue #49}

British writer George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]
George Bernard Shaw Quotations Page at Working Minds

Harry Shearer
“I think [the Fox Network] has been indisputably a force for evil in the world.”  {Issue #41}

Gail Sheehy
“When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.”  {blog 3/2016}

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen [1895-1979]
“Some will not look on suffering because [to do so] creates responsibility.”  {blog 12/2017}

columnist John Sheirer
“Future historians will have to end every paragraph about Trump with the disclaimer, 'Seriously, no kidding,
he really said that sh*t'.” - on Facebook  {blog 12/2018}

Mary {Wollstonecraft Godwin} Shelley [1797-1851]
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”  {blog 11/2014}

English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley [1792-1827]
“Shake off your chains like dew / You are many, they are few.”  {Issue #56}

William Shenstone [1714-63]
“The proper means of increasing the love [that] we bear our native country is to reside some time
in a foreign one.”  {blog 10/2009}

U.S. Army General Phillip Sheridan [1831-88]
“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”  {blog 10/2011}

Civil War General Wm. Tecumseh Sherman [1820-91]
“I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” - on 5 June 1884  {blog 10/2008 & 7/2011}

David K. Shipler
“Half the working poor [in America] are working mothers . . . It is time to be ashamed.”
["The Working Poor" Knopf 2004]  {Issues #43 & #46}

Shirdi Sai Baba [1838?-1918]
“Life is a song - sing it. Life is a game - play it. Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a dream - realize it.
Life is a sacrifice - offer it. Life is love - enjoy it.”  {blog 11/2022}

Clay Shirky
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”  {blog 6/2012}

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich [1906-75]
“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”  {blog 5/2016}

novelist Anita Shreve [1946-2018]
“All love is doomed, seen in the light of death.”  {blog 4/2018}

Beth Shulman, Russell Sage Foundation
“It is a blight on our democracy that in the richest country in the world,
workers cannot support themselves and their families.”  {Issue #46}

Dave Shulman
“Do you remember the last time [that] anyone was terrorized by agnostic fundamentalists?”
(letter to L.A. Weekly October 2001)  {Issue #43}

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius [1865-1957]
“No one ever erected a statue to a music critic.”  {Issue #50}

Algernon Sidney [1623-83]
“The only ends for which governments are constituted, and obedience render'd to them, are the obtaining
of justice and protection; and they who cannot provide for both give the people a right of taking such ways
as best please themselves, in order to [affect] their own safety.” - in 1672  {blog 8/2011}

Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Perhaps . . . the world will come to us, in unmediated purposefulness,
if we look at it hard enough and promise to be good.”   {Issue #21}

Tom Siegfried at Science News [est. 1921]
“Science, unlike certain political philosophies and personality cults, corrects its mistakes.”  {blog 2/2021}

Igor Sikorsky [1889-1972]
“Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.”  {blog 11/2011}

Ignazio Silone { pseudonym of Italian author & politician Secondino Tranquilli [1900-78] }
“You can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you are lazy, obtuse, or servile within yourself,
[then] you are not free.” — in 1955  {blog 9/2014}

statistician Nate Silver
“Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood,
as though this will make them go away.”  {blog 8/2013}

actress-comedian Sarah Silverman
• • “I still wake up so jazzed that I don’t have to go to school.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “The reason [that] people become funny is to overcome pain.”  {blog 11/2015}

cartoonist & poet Shel Silverstein [1930-99]
• • “But all the magic I have known, I've had to make myself.” — in "Where The Sidewalk Ends", 1974  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the
never haves, then listen close to me . . . Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”  {blog 10/2015}

Georges Simenon [1903-89]
“Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”  {Issue #37}

rocker Gene Simmons
“Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself.”  {blog 1/2011}

Oscar-winning actor J.K. Simmons
“The thing about [independent films] is that you know everybody's there for the right reasons.”  {blog 3/2015}

William Gilmore Simms [1806-70]
“The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march
of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.”  {blog 4/2011}

Diane Simon
“Deregulation [of broadcast media] has made celebrities of the loudest asses in the barn.”  {blog 1/2011}

playwright Neil Simon [1927-2018]
• • “There are two laws of the universe – gravity, and everyone likes Italian food.”  {blog 3/2011}
• • “If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine Floor.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “If you can go through life without experiencing pain, you probably haven't been born yet.”  {blog 9/2018}

William E. Simon [1927-2000]
“Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.”  {blog 5/2009}

Homer Simpson, your spiritual advisor
“Every time I learn something new, something old falls out. And I might really need that!”  {blog 5/2020}

Frank Sinatra [1915-98]
“A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late.”  {blog 11/2015}

author Jen Sincero
“If you're serious about changing your life, you'll find a way. If not, you'll find an excuse.”  {blog 12/2018}

author Upton Sinclair [1878-1968]
• • “The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that
practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “The supreme crime of [organized religion] to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences
it is on the side of sloth of mind, that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.”
- in "The Profits of Religion: An Essay In Economic Interpretation" (1918)  {blog 8/2014}
• • “There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside;
and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”  {blog 9/2014}

motivational speaker Simon Sinek
• • “Working hard for something [that] we don't care about is called stress; working hard for something [that] we love
is called passion.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge.”  {blog 7/2017}
• • “Leadership is not about the next election, it's about the next generation.” ( after James Freeman Clarke [1810-88] )  {blog 3/2018}
• • “A boss has the title, a leader has the people.”  {blog 7/2018}

Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]
• • “We've got to believe in free will, we've got no choice.”  {Issue #37 & blog 6/2012}
• • “The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “If you tell about one place really well, you tell about the whole world.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a prophet.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “I did not become a vegetarian for my health; I did it for the health of the chickens.”  {blog 2/2019}

David Sipress, New Yorker Magazine cartoonist
“Oy f*@#king vey!”  {blog 11/2016}

Frédérik Sisa
“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to neo-conservatism.”  {Issue #49}

Native American leader Sitting Bull [1831?-1890]
• • “What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “As individual fingers we can be broken, but together we make a mighty fist.”  {blog 12/2011}

Swami Sivananda [1887-1963]
“Put your heart, mind and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.”  {blog 6/2019}

mystery author team Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö
• • “The law has been designed to protect certain social classes and their dubious interests,
and otherwise seems mostly to consist of loopholes.”  {Issue #38}
• • “She was herself and not his; perhaps that was the best thing about her.”
– in "The Terrorists", 1976  {Issue #43}

Red Skelton [1913-97]
“All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.”  {blog 9/2011}

American psychologist B.F. Skinner [1904-90]
• • “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “The choice is clear: either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future
to overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behaviour to create a social environment in which
we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardising the chances that those who
follow us will be able to do the same.” (in 1948)  {blog 7/2010}

Cornelia Otis Skinner [1899-1979]
“Women's virtue is man's greatest invention.”  {blog 12/2013}

Jim Sleeper
“Homeland security patriotism . . . has turned the neo-cons' idea of loyalty into a loveless
lock step and their democratic creed into Orwellian sloganeering.”  {blog 2/2009}

William Joseph Slim [1891-1970]
“When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action
you should take, choose the bolder.”  {blog 3/2010}

Christine Smallwood
“All important writers [ask] us to consider if this is the way it has to be.”  {Issue #59}

theologian Louis B. Smedes [1921-2001]
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”  {blog 8/2018}

Jane Smiley
“[Art] only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.”  {blog 12/2007}

philosopher-economist Adam Smith [1723-90]
• • “The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue,
but something more than that proportion.” – in "The Wealth of Nations", 1776  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”  {blog 7/2012 & 8/2023}
• • “The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”  {blog 2/2018}

U.K. journalist Alan Smith
“Statistics are at their most powerful when they surprise us.”  {blog 2/2017}

poet Alexander Smith [1830–67]
“A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.”  {blog 6/2012}

H. Allen Smith [1907-76]
“Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization . . . The godawful glares
that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these
manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath.” - in 1947  {blog 6/2012}

pioneer radio evangelist J. Harold Smith [1910-2001]
“More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren't so busy denying them.”  {blog 4/2024}

experimental filmmaker Jack Smith [1932-89]
“Make perfect art and you will be admired. Make imperfect art and you will be loved.”  {blog 10/2018}

Logan Pearsall Smith [1865-1946]
“There are two things to aim at in life: First, to get what you want, and then to enjoy it.
Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.”  {blog 3/2008}

Lucia Failla Smith
“The loser moron can’t comprehend the danger. Putin is praising the moron into giving up this country's
strongest asset. Democracy.” - on Facebook  {blog 11/2017}

Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University
“Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?”   {blog 4/2009}

Richard Norton Smith
“Cable 'news' [is] largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical, and the tawdry.”  {blog 2/2010}

British author Zadie Smith
• • “The past is always tense, the future perfect.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.”  {blog 3/2013}
• • “One of the things [that] citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs.”  {blog 3/2018}

Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl Of Derby [1752–1834]
“Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.”  {blog 11/2022}

Jan Smuts [1870-1950]
“When in doubt, do the courageous thing.”  {Issue #50}

author Lemony Snicket
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”  {blog 3/2017}

Snoopy character of the Peanuts comic strip drawn by Charles M. Schulz [1922-2000]
“Dog food again?”  {blog 8/2012}

whistleblower Edward Snowden, in exile in Russia
“From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cellphone tower you pass, friend you keep,
article you write, [web]site you visit, subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.”
– June 2013 email to filmmaker Laura Poitras  {blog 7/2015}

Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates [470?-399 BCE]
• • “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.”  {blog 6/2008}
• • “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one,
you'll become a philosopher.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “Wisdom begins in wonder.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Smart people learn from everything and everyone. Average people [learn] from their experiences.
Stupid people already have all the answers.”  {blog 5/2018}
• • “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.”  {blog 7/2018}
• • “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  {blog 1/2022}
• • “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”  {blog 12/2023}

movie director Steven Soderbergh
“If you make any film that accurately portrays the world as it is – that portrays people's lives
the way [that] they actually are – by definition, that's a political film.”  {blog 12/2010}

writer Rebecca Solnit
• • “Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes the knees.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is.”  {blog 4/2013}

Medieval philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol [1021-70 C.E.]
“The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.”- possibly a shortened version of "Wisdom of Solomon" 6:17  {blog 5/2022}

Brad Solomon
“When the people who are supposed to be running this country go around saying [that] they aren't crooks
and everyone knows [that] they are, this country is in very big trouble.”  {Issue #55}

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]
• • “Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever
loved great writers, only minor ones.”  {blog 4/2013}

Stephen Sondheim
“Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.”  {blog 1/2012}

Helmut Sonnenfeldt
“Henry [Kissinger] does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature.”  {blog 11/2008}

Susan Sontag [1933-2004]
• • “Be serious, be passionate, wake up!”  {Issue #49}
• • “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known.”  {blog 1/2011}
• • “Sanity is a cozy lie.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”  {blog 5/2017}

Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles [496-406 B.C.E]
“One word / Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: / That word is love.”  {blog 5/2018}

Emma Soren
“I don’t make the rules – the elves do.” - in The New Yorker Magazine  {blog 12/2019}

cartoonist Jen Sorensen
“SHUT UP - in the name of free speech!”  {blog 3/2015}

cowboy artist Jack Sorenson
“A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal.”  {blog 4/2024}

TV producer Aaron Sorkin
• • “Decisions are made by those who show up.”  {Issue #23}
• • “The only thing harder than speaking truth to power is speaking truth to stupid.”  {blog 3/2015}

financier George Soros
“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”  {blog 2/2021}

John B.L. Soule [1815-91]
editor of the Terre Haute, Indiana Express newspaper
“[New York Tribune editor] Horace Greeley himself could not give a young man better advice
than 'Go west, young man'.” – in 1851  {blog 10/2008}

bandleader John Philip Sousa [1854-1932]
“Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.”  {blog 1/2011}

John E. Southard [1915-93]
“The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.”  {blog 8/2017}

Thomas Sowell [b. 1930]
• • “Elections should be held on April 16th - the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things
that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “The older I get, the more I realize that arguing on the basis of facts and logic only gets you labeled as someone who is out of step
with the times, if not lacking in compassion.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.
The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”  {blog 5/2018}

Spartacus character - in the movie "Spartacus" [1960]
“We'll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that?”  {blog 9/2016 & 6/2019}

Larry Speakes [1939-2014], Reagan's White House spokesperson
“If you tell a story five times, it's true.”  {Issue #37}

Gerry Spence [b. 1929]
“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”  {Issue #42}

Henry Spencer
“Life is so much more meaningful if you take the time to hunt down and strangle
twits who post blather to inappropriate newsgroups.”  {blog 10/2009}

British philosopher Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]
• • “[Creationists] who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts
seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.” – in an 1852 essay  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”  {blog 10/2009 & 12/2011}
• • “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance –
that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”  {blog 1/2017}

environmental lawyer James Gustave Speth
“Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability,
social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force.”  {blog 11/2008}

mystery author Mickey Spillane [1918-2006]
• • “Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown,
they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.”  {Issue #67}
• • “[New York is] fun city. If the pollution doesn't get you, the traffic will. If you live thru
those two, you're fair game for the street hunters.” – in "Survival ... Zero", 1970  {blog 10/2010}
• • “There are no poor politicians.”  {blog 10/2010}

Baruch Benedictus de Spinoza [1632-77]
• • “Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity.”  {Issue #18}
• • “All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”  {Issue #53 & blog 10/2007 & blog 11/2010}
• • “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.”  {blog 2/2018}

science fiction author Norman Spinrad [b. 1940]
“The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life
is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.”  {Issue #71}

Lysander Spooner [1808-87]
“The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists
in keeping their money in their own pockets.”   {blog 8/2009}

Spotsylvania County, Virginia school board
“I think we should throw those [29] books in a fire.”  {blog 1/2022}
~~ Rabih Abuismail, board member, after the full board unanimously passed a resolution to remove certain books (including fiction about teens struggling
to overcome sexual abuse) from a high school library in November 2021; board member Kirk Twigg seconded the idea

Rev. William Buell Sprague [1795-1876]
“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”  {blog 11/2014}

Nancy Springer
“Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.”  {blog 6/2016}

rock music legend Bruce Springsteen
• • “It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.”  {Issue #53}
• • “You were born with the power of a locomotive.”  {Issue #53}
• • “It's theatre, you know. I'm whispering in your ear, and you're dreaming my dreams, and then
I'm getting a feeling for yours. I've been doing that for forty years.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “The criminal ineptitude [after Hurricane Katrina] makes you furious.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “Unions have been the only powerful and effective voice [that] working people have ever had in the history
of this country.” - in 2024  {blog 7/2024}

K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy
“The human ability to innovate out of a jam is profound. That's why Darwin will always be right
and Malthus will always be wrong.”  {blog 12/2009}

Nadine Stair
“If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.”
— based on a 1953 poem by Don Herold [1889-1966]  {blog 4/2017}

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin [1878-1953]
“It is enough that the people know [that] there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing.
The people who count the votes decide everything.”  {Issue #56 & blog 1/2018}

internet activist Richard M. Stallman
“Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.”  {blog 8/2014}

action star Sylvester 'Sly' Stallone
• • “Old men start wars, young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural.
Peace is an accident. We're animals.” (thesis of "Rambo" [2008], cut from the film)   {blog 2/2008}
• • “We should always have goals. If you don't have a mountain, build one and then climb it. And after
you climb it, build another one; otherwise you start to flatline in your life.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “Sometimes you gotta give up your principles and do what's right.”
~~ Stallone's character in the movie "Bullet To The Head" [2013]  {blog 3/2013}
• • (re: acting) “You've got to show your soul. Otherwise, you're just a piece of equipment.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Rambo is me before coffee in the morning; Rocky is me after coffee.” - in 2019  {blog 11/2022}

Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield [1694-1773]
• • “Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife,
very often needed but seldom minded.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Know the true value of time; snatch, sieze, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no delay,
no procrastination – never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”  {blog 9/2011}

suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]
• • “Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.”  {blog 11/2015}

Freya Stark [1893-1993]
“There can be no happiness if the things [that] we believe in are different from the things [that] we do.”   {blog 10/2011}

Gen. John Stark [1728-1822]
“Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.”  {blog 8/2009}

author Charlie Steel
“Every move [that] Mitch McConnell, the President, and the Republicans make is cruel.”  {blog 6/2019}

professional idiot Ben Stein
“Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating.”  {blog 2/2014}

Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]
• • “I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.”  {blog 10/2011}
• • “In Art and Dream may you proceed with abandon.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “Men go faster these days, but I do not believe [that] they go anywhere better.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “We are always the same age inside.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Romance is everything.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.”  {blog 8/2017}
• • “A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”  {blog 1/2018}

author John Steinbeck [1902-68]
John Steinbeck Quotations Page at Working Minds
John Steinbeck Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

feminist Gloria Steinem
• • “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
G.E. Nordell: “Let's not be sexist: A man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle.”  {Issue #36}
• • “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”  {Issue #62}
• • “Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day. After all, a movement is only people moving.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “The next few years are going to be hell.” - in November 2016  {blog 6/2017}

photographer Lisl Steiner
“Don't be possessed by your possessions.”  {blog 6/2012}

Stendhal [1783-1842]
“Life is too short, and the time [that] we waste in yawning can never be regained.”  {blog 9/2012}

Richard Stengel, managing editor at TIME Magazine, 2006-2013
“This is the worst economy since The Great Depression.”  {blog 5/2009}

Alexander Stephens [1812-83]
Vice President of the Confederate States of America, 1861-65
“The Constitution . . . rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations
are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural
and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
- in his "Cornerstone Speech" on 21 March 1861  {blog 7/2021}

Aaron Stern
“The education of our children . . . is the most noble thing in the world to do.”  {blog 10/2010}

Cat Stevens
the goodbye makes the journey harder still (song lyric)  {blog 11/2017}

Jay Stevens of Long Beach, California
“Bush's deficits have to be brought under control now, or it really won't matter
what we do about Social Security in the future.”  {Issue #49}

poet Wallace Stevens [1879-1955]
• • “One sits and beats an old tin can lard pail / One beats and beats for that which one believes”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “One must have the mind of winter to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”  {blog 8/2014}

American statesman Adlai E. Stevenson II [1900-65]
Governor of Illinois, 1949-53
Democratic presidential candidate, 1952 & 1956
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1961–1965
• • “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” {Issue #36}
• • “What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean
is a sense of national responsibility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion,
but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”  {Issue #61}
• • “A nation glued to the television screen . . . can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash
and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul.” (in 1959)  {blog 5/2009}
• • “If [the Republicans] will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
during the 1952 campaign  {blog 8/2012}
• • “In America, anyone can become President. It's one of the risks [that] we take.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends ... that if they will stop
telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Democracy cannot be saved by supermen, but only by the unswerving devotion and goodness of millions of little men.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “There are worse things than losing an election. The worst thing is to lose one's convictions and not tell the people the truth.”  {blog 8/2016}

author Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894]
• • “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow
anonymous benefits upon the world.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find
in our travels is an honest friend.”   {blog 5/2009}
• • “Wine is bottled poetry.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “Don't judge each day by the harvest [that] you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”  {blog 6/2011 & 2/2021}
• • “There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner,
the sweets come last.”   {blog 7/2012}
• • “To be what we are, and to be what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indespensible; and no man is useless
while he has a friend.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “I travel not to go anywhere, but to travel. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Don't judge each day by the harvest [that] you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”   {blog 4/2015 & 3/2016}
• • “When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”  {blog 7/2021}

TV talk show host Jon Stewart
• • “Sean Hannity is probably the most loathsome dude at Fox News. Everything is presented in as devious a manner
as it could possibly be presented.”   {blog 3/2015}
• • “Evil is relatively rare. Ignorance is epidemic.”  {blog 11/2020}

Martha Stewart
“Start planning before you think you should.”  {blog 12/2012}

billionaire Tom Steyer
“One of the primary roots of wealth inequality: the richest Americans get to live by a different set of rules than everyone else.”
- op-ed in USA Today in October 2018  {blog 3/2020}

Gustav Stickley [1858-1942]
“The most exquisite things in nature and in art possess an indefinable quality called style.”  {blog 3/2014}

David Stockman, Reagan's budget director
“The Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves.”
on "60 Minutes" in October 2010  {blog 11/2010}

Dr. DaShanne Stokes
“Building bridges takes us further than building walls.”  {blog 9/2018}

I.F. Stone [1907-89]
“All governments are liars.”  {Issue #56}

movie director Oliver Stone
• • His motto: “To kiss the lips of women, love the gods, do justice, laugh,
and know [that] the world is mad.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “What kept me going was maybe stubbornness and a lack of good sense.”  {blog 9/2008}

W. Clement Stone [1902-2002]
“You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to,
but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.”  {blog 2/2009}

British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard
• • “It is better to know useless things than to know nothing.”  {Issue #53}
• • “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order,
you can nudge the world a little.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “It's better to be quotable than to be honest.”  {blog 10/2012}

author Rex Stout [1886-1975]
• • “There is no such thing as a minus quantity except in mathematics.”  {Issue #57}
• • “What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?”  {blog 6/2012}
• • “A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “The subconscious is not a grave; it is a cistern.”  {blog 8/2017}

abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-96]
• • “There are worlds of money wasted, at this [Holiday Season] time of year, in getting things
that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” – in 1850  {blog 12/2009}
• • “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you 'til it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer,
never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.”  {blog 12/2018}
• • “One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic;
or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something [that] the best people have always done.”  {blog 8/2019}
• • “To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life,
is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.”  {blog 2/2021}
• • “So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't {sic} somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?”  {blog 10/2021}
• • “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”  {blog 12/2024}

Straight-Line Business School Intl. [est. 2010] in Holland
“F*ck political correctness. Let's make THE WORLD great (again)!”  {blog 1/2018}

British writer Lytton Strachey [1880-1932]
“Uninterpreted truth is as useless as buried gold.”  {blog 7/2016}

Dr. Stephen Strange, fictional character from Marvel Comics
“Not all capes wear heroes.”  {blog 8/2019}

Igor Stravinsky [1882-1971]
“I listen to Beethoven every week, and to Bach twice a week, but to Mozart every day.”  {blog 12/2008}

Cheryl Strayed
• • “Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow.
Let it nurture you because it will.”   {blog 3/2014}
• • “There's no 'right' way to write a book. I simply write to find out what I have to write.”  {blog 3/2016}

Meryl Streep
“You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.”  {blog 11/2013}

William Strunk, Jr. [1869-1946]
“Vigorous writing is concise.”  {blog 2/2017}

Adam Stuart
“Somehow, I don’t feel like I’m being made great again.” - on Facebook 10/2017  {blog 10/2017}

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute
“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”  {blog 3/2014}

scifi author Theodore Sturgeon [1918-85]
• • “Belief or nonbelief has no power over objective truth.” – in his short story "Dazed" (Galaxy, 9/1971) {blog 6/2015}
• • “Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future,
but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.”  {blog 12/2024}

writer-director Preston Sturges [1898-1959]
“Nothing is too much trouble for the busy man. If you ever want anything done,
always ask the busy man. The others never have time.”  {Issue #70}

William Styron [1925-2006]
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”   {blog 7/2015}

Andrew Sullivan, TIME Magazine
“Cover-ups are not as common in human history as screw-ups.”  {Issue #41}

journalist Margaret M. Sullivan
“Tucker Carlson’s claim that white supremacy is a hoax is easy to prove wrong. Just watch his show.”  {blog 8/2019}

American newspaper publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger [1891-1968]
“Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process, and make him something less than a man.”  {blog 4/2011}

economist Lawrence Summers
“There are idiots. Look around.”  {blog 4/2010}

Mark Sumner, writer on Daily Kos
“The future isn't as far away as it used to be.”  {blog 1/2023}

James Suroweicki, New Yorker Magazine writer
“We are stuck with an unemployment rate three points higher than the postwar average, and the percentage
of working adult Americans is as low as it's been in almost thirty years.”  {blog 5/2012}
{"Be sure to thank a Republican." ~~ G.E. Nordell}

Canadian eco-journalist David Suzuki
• • “Many people, especially politicians, say we can’t shift from fossil fuels overnight. That may be true,
but if we don’t start, we’ll never get there.”  {blog 12/2018}
• • “We've reached a point where every day must be Earth Day.”  {blog 5/2020}

baseball player Ichiro Suzuki
“People striving for approval from others become phony.”  {blog 9/2013}

violinist & music teacher Shinichi Suzuki [1898-1998]
“When love is deep, much can be accomplished.”  {blog 7/2017}

Suzuki Shunryu Daiosho [1904-71]
• • “The world is its own magic.”  {Issue #13}
• • “In activity there should be calmness, and in calmness there should be activity.”  {Issue #53}
• • “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.”  {blog 11/2017}

'SW', in the Albuquerque Journal Sound Off! opinion section
“George Washington could not tell a lie. Richard Nixon could not tell the truth. Donald Trump cannot tell the difference.”  {blog 12/2019}

Al Swearengen [1845-1904]
“History is a lie agreed upon.”  {blog 6/2015}

meat-packing baron Gustavus Franklin Swift [1839-1903]
“The secret of all great undertakings is hard work and self-reliance.”  {blog 4/2017}

Jonathan Swift [1667–1745]
• • “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”  {Issue #45 & blog 3/2016}
• • “When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”  {Issue #67 & blog 1/2008}
• • “We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of a spider.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing [that] he was never reasoned into.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “As the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be
believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies,
and truth comes limping after it . . .”  {blog 11/2022}

pop singer Taylor Swift
“Happiness and confidence are the greatest things [that] you can wear.”  {blog 7/2013}

Charles Rozell 'Chuck' Swindoll
“Life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent of how I react to it.”   {blog 4/2015}

football coach Barry Switzer
“There are many people who don't know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life
thinking [that] they hit a triple.”  {blog 8/2019}

Herbert Bayard Swope [1882-1958]
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula
for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.”  {Issue #43}

Charlie Sykes, writer for The Bulwark U.K. [est. 2018]
“A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.”  {blog 7/2022}

motivational speaker Marshall Sylver
“There is no question that love is not the answer to.”  {blog 7/2017}

Polish Nobel-laureate Wislawa Symborska [1923-2012]
“We know ourselves only insofar as we have been tested.”  {blog 2/2018}

Publilius Syrus [First Century B.C.E.]
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”  {Issue #70}

psychiatrist Thomas Szasz [1920-2012]
“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.”  {blog 11/2013}

Albert Szent-Györgi [1893-1986]
“Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen
and thinking what no one else has thought.”  {Issue #18}

Antonio Tabucchi
“It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.”  {blog 2/2008}

Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus [56?-117? C.E.]
“Flatterers are the worst type of enemy.”  {blog 2/2014}

Nobel-laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]
• • “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”   {blog 1/2012}
• • “The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”  {blog 6/2017}

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone writer
“When one hundred million people don't vote, the nation is not bitterly divided.
The nation mostly doesn't give a sh*t.”  {blog 4/2010}

actor George Takei
• • “No right worth fighting for is ever earned without a fight. Selma, Stonewall, Seneca Falls - channel the struggle and spirit of those
who came before you. Understand that this is your time now. And make it count for them, for those around you, for those whose
lives are yet to come.” - on twitter  {blog 7/2018}
• • “Fellas, I don't want to create a stampede, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is now available.”  {blog 10/2022}

finance expert John R. Talbott
• • “The question for America no longer comes down to Democrats vs. Republicans nor liberals vs. conservatives nor
free market libertarians vs. anti-globalists, but rather to a simple formulation of the people vs. the elites . . . Wake up!
The Class War has already begun.”  in 2004  {blog 3/2017}
• • “Wake up! The Class War has already begun.” - in 2004  {blog 8/2017}

Nassim Nichilas Taleb
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”  {blog 9/2015}

Albert J. Tally
“The reason [that] American cities are prosperous is that there is no place to sit down.” - in 1924  {blog 6/2012}

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand [1754-1838]
[on coffee:] “Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.”  {blog 10/2015}

Amy Tan
• • “Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.”  {blog 7/2017}

musician Serj Tankian
“Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.”  {blog 9/2014}

Jonathan Taplin
“Data is the new oil.” - in "Move Fast and Break Things" [2017]  {blog 5/2017}

Lewis Tappan [1788–1873]
“When will the poor negro have his rights? Not, I believe, until he has a musket in one hand and a ballot in the other.”  {blog 11/2014}

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
• • “What constitutes a freak when nearly the entire culture has become a freak show?”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “As long as human beings aspire, they will be capable of corrupting the object of their aspiration.”  {blog 11/2016}

novelist Elizabeth Taylor of U.K.
“It is very strange that the years teach us patience – that the shorter our time, the greater
our capacity for waiting.”  {blog 7/2012}

film critic Ella Taylor
“The fundamental tragedy is not death, but the unlived life.”  {blog 7/2016}

Harold Taylor
“The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become.”  {blog 2/2016}

Meiyoko Taylor
“Get to a point in life where the only direction is forward, your only focus is progress, and the only outcome is victory.”  {blog 11/2017}

radio talk show host Stacy Taylor
“The situation is fluid.”  {blog 11/2007}

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [1840-93]
“At the moment of creativity, absolute inner peace is essential for the artist.”  {blog 4/2012}

physicist Edward Teller [1908-2003]
“The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.”  {blog 2/2018}

Scot Tempesta {aka Scooter}, then-host on K.L.S.D. talk radio in San Diego, California
“When the media puts the truth next to a lie, that's not balance, that's distortion.”   {Issue #64}

Shirley Temple {Black} [1928-2014]
• • “When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected.”   {blog 4/2009}
• • “When I was 14, I was the oldest [that] I ever was. I've been getting younger ever since.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “There's nothing like real love. Nothing.”  {blog 2/2016}

Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-92]
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'It will be happier . . .'.”  {blog 3/2014}

Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer [185? – 159? B.C.E.] known as Terence
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto — "I am human, and I think [that] nothing human is alien to me.”  {blog 2/2018 & 7/2021}

broadcast journalist  Louis 'Studs' Terkel [1912-2008]
• • “When it comes to the news, the corporate view is 'objective', all else is 'propaganda'.”   {blog 4/2010}
• • “People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history.
It goes from one generation to another.”  {blog 8/2014}
• • “I was constantly astonished by the extraordinary DREAMS of ordinary people.” – in "Working" (1974)  {blog 9/2014}
• • “More and more we are into communications – and less and less into communication.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Heroes are not great statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community,
and it is my responsibility to make it better.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work
the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.”   {blog 4/2015}

Jervey Tervalon
“The impulse to write fiction is a function of living your life as though it is important.”  {Issue #66}

visionary Nikola Tesla [1856-1943]
• • “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.”  {Issue #14}
• • “Be alone – that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product
of his creative brain.” – in "My Inventions" (1919)  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.”  {blog 10/2016}
• • “Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion, free of outside influences
beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention, that is when ideas are born.”  {blog 11/2022}

William Makepeace Thackeray [1811-63]
“Bravery never goes out of fashion.”  {blog 10/2012}

Twyla Tharp
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”  {blog 1/2011}

Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013], former U.K. Prime Minister
• • “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by
the traffic from both sides.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time
and you would achieve nothing.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “You can't lead from the crowd.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions: he had money as well.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “I'm back . . . and you knew I was coming. On my way here I passed a cinema with the sign 'The Mummy Returns'.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “Power is like being a lady . . . If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”  {blog 10/2018}

cartoonist Bob Thaves
“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything [that] Fred Astaire did, but she did it
backwards and in high heels.” (in 1982) {not Faith Whittlesey}  {Issue #36}

The Who band
“God, there's got to be another way” — line from "Who Are You?" song, 1978  {blog 11/2010}

Aaron Thier
“For many Americans, the end of the world is already here.” (in 2013)  {blog 7/2013}

memoirist Abigail Thomas
“Good things happen slowly, bad things happen fast.”  {blog 12/2015}

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas [1914-54]
“Sometimes I write sober and revise drunk, sometimes I write drunk and revise sober.”  {blog 9/2008}

Lewis Thomas [1913-93]
“The urge to be useful is probably more important to [humans] than survival,
or feeding, or propagating, or anything else.”  {Issue #45}

gonzo journalist  Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]
• • “[America is] a dead broke nation at war with all but three or four countries
in the world, and three of those don't count.”  {Issue #50}
• • “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”  {Issue #66}
• • “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always
worked for me.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves
and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”  {blog 7/2008}
• • “I'm an idiot, I'm a fool, I know . . . but I've been a good read, right?” (in his suicide note)  {blog 10/2008}
• • “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “I learned a long time ago that reality is much weirder than anyone's imagination.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”  {blog 4/2013 & 5/2022}
• • “There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “The slow-rising central horror of 'WaterGate' is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president
whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might
somehow fail to learn something from it.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “[America is] really just a nation of [340] million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all
about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”  {blog 1/2022}
• • “Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in
sideways, chocolate and wine in one hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming 'WOO HOO - what a ride!'.”  {blog 12/2023}

Richard Thompson
“To see both sides of a quarrel / Is to judge without hate or alarm”  (song lyric)  {blog 5/2015}

silent movie star Fred C. Thomson [1890-1928]
“The most effective idealist is one who is nine-tenths entertainer.”  {blog 10/2007}

transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]
Henry David Thoreau Quotations Page at Working Minds
Henry David Thoreau Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

Clifford Wallace Thornton, Jr.
“Wisdom is everything! It makes one a slave to the truth.”  {blog 6/2019}

Greek historian Thucydides [c.460–c.395 BCE]
“Stories happen to those who tell them.”  {blog 4/2013}

Bambi's friend Thumper
“If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.”   {blog 5/2012}

teenage eco-activist Greta Thunberg of Stockholm, Sweden
• • “We are the change and change is coming.” - at the end of her speech at the Fridays For Future rally in Montreal, Canada on 9/27/2019  {blog 12/2019}
• • “We are telling you to act as if you love your children above all else.” - at the World Economic Forum in 1/2020  {blog 2/2021}
• • “Giving up is simply not an option.”  {blog 3/2023}

author-cartoonist James Thurber [1894-1961]
• • “Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”  {Issue #62}
• • “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “Discussion in America means dissent.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “It's better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations
those of libel.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself
in a great rear-end collision.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers.”  {blog 1/2011}
• • “Don't get it right, just get it written.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean every thing.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “One martini is all right, two are too many, and three are not enough.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “Beautiful things don't ask for attention.”  {blog 1/2018}

James Thurber [1894-1961] & E.B. White [1899-1985]
“Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.”  {blog 3/2015}

mystery author team Aimée & David Thurlo
“Religious beliefs, no matter the culture, seldom depend on logic and rationality
and often bring out the worst in people.”  {blog 12/2007}

Wallace Thurman [1902-34], considered a member of the The Harlem Renaissance
“I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part
are more than a trifle insane.”  {blog 12/2018}

stage magician Howard Thurston [1869-1936]
“Remember, ladies & gentlemen: We wouldn't fool you for the world!”  {blog 2/2021}

Casey Tibbs [1929-90]
“Maybe the American cowboy represents the last of the free men.”  {blog 8/2008}

Tiberius Caesar [42 B.C.E. – 37 A.D.]
“How eager you all are to become slaves.”  {Issue #57}

Patrick Tillman, Sr.
father of sports star & war hero Pat Tillman [1976-2004]
“The path to true patriotism is confronting your government when it lies.”  {Issue #54}

futurist Alvin Toffler [1928-2016]
• • “Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.” (1990)  {Issue #36}
• • “The illiterate of the XXIst Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who
cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “The political technology of the Industrial Age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization
taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.”  {blog 10/2016}
• • “Change is not merely necessary to life – it is Life.”  {blog 1/2017}

J.R.R. Tolkien [1892-1973]
• • “Not all those who wander are lost.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “I wish life was not so short . . . languages take such a time, and so do all the things [that] one wants to know about.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”  {blog 8/2016}

Eckhart Tolle
• • “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts [that] you are thinking.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.”  {blog 11/2022}

Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910] of Russia
• • “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal –
that there is no human relation between master and slave.”  {blog 2/2016}
• • “There was no answer except the usual answer [that] life gives to the most complicated and insoluble questions.
This answer is: Carry on with your everyday affairs, that is to say, put it out of your mind.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “The strongest of all warriors are these two: Time and Patience.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “If you feel pain, you're alive. If you feel other people's pain, you're a human being.”  {blog 3/2023}

actress Marisa Tomei
“You can't really be old in L.A., it's kind of like a crime.”  {blog 11/2020}

actress-comedian Lily Tomlin
• • “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.” {Issues #7 & #34 & #91}
• • “I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.”  {Issue #36}
• • “For fast acting relief, try slowing down.”  {Issue #62 & blog 10/2022}
• • “Why is it that when we talk to God we are said to be praying, but when God talks to us we are said
to be schizophrenic?”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity that somebody wishes they had missed.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “The road to success is always under construction.”  {blog 12/2017}

H.M. Tomlinson [1873-1958]
“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”  {blog 11/2014}

cartoonist Tom Tomorrow
“Life is simple when you ignore the complicated parts.”  {blog 5/2015}

cooking show host Christina Tosi's mom, Greta Tosi
“Chasing your dreams is not for the faint of heart.”  {blog 7/2022}

Maurice Tourneur [1876-1961]
“Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic.”  {blog 12/2013}

Alair Townsend, New York City deputy mayor (circa 1980)
“I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.”  {blog 11/2020}
— statement later endorsed by Ed Koch [1924-2013], New York City mayor, 1978-89

historian Arnold J. Toynbee [1889-1975]
• • “The perversity of human nature is the greatest of the mysteries of human life.”  {Issue #68}
• • “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.”  {blog 5/2013 & 11/2015}
• • “History is just one damned thing after another.” - falsely credited  {blog 10/2017}
original saying is “Life is just one damned thing after another." ~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]

Aiden Wilson Tozer [1897-1963]
“Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.”  {blog 2/2016}

motivational speaker Brian Tracy
“I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, be more active, show up more often.”  {blog 4/2024}

actor Spencer Tracy [1900-67]
“I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors.”  {blog 3/2013}

Alexandra K. Trenfor of Bogotá, Colombia
“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.”  {blog 5/2017}

historian Hugh Trevor-Roper [1914-2003]
“History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context
of what might have happened.”   {blog 9/2011}

Old Testament scholar Phyllis Trible
“If without stories we live not, stories live not without us.”  {blog 1/2022}

critic Diana Trilling [1905-96]
“There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.”  {blog 12/2013}

Lionel Trilling [1905-75]
“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”  {blog 3/2012}

historian Marshall Trimble
“Don't worry about old age; it doesn't last that long.”  {blog 2/2019}

Anthony Trollope [1815-82]
• • “Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”   {blog 4/2013}
• • “One's country had no right to demand everything. There is much that is higher and better and grander than one's own
country. One is patriotic only because one is too small and weak to be cosmopolitan.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?”  {blog 9/2017}

Leon Trotsky [1879-1940]
“Life is not an easy matter. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea
which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”  {blog 5/2018}

Kilgore Trout character, as written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
“You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.” – in "Timequake" [1997 novel]  {blog 1/2012}

Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury"
“Iraq is the new Afghanistan.” (in 2005)  {Issue #53}

film director François Truffaut [1932-84] of France
• • “When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same
things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “Life is hard, but it's wonderful.” (in "Small Change", 1976)  {blog 1/2008}
• • “In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.”  {blog 5/2008}

Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]
United States Senator from Missouri, 1935-1945
34th Vice President of the United States, January–April 1945
33rd President of the United States, 1945-53
• • “The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.”  {Issue #37}
• • “No government is ever perfect. One of the chief virtues of democracy, however, is that its defects
are always visible and under democratic process can be pointed out and corrected.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “The only thing new in this world is the history we don't know.”  {blog 2/2012 & 5/2018}
• • “Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever
apologize for anything.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.”  {blog 9/2016}

screenwriter Dalton Trumbo [1905-76]
• • “Democracy means that the people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that
they can worship any God in any way [that] they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.”  {blog 11/2015}
• • “Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “What the imagination can't conjure, reality delivers with a shrug.”  {blog 2/2016}
• • “Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that.
Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.”  {blog 5/2016}
• • “A good businessman never makes a contract unless he's sure [that] he can carry it thru, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing
to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “We'll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that?” - line in the movie "Spartacus" [1960]  {blog 9/2016 & 6/2019}
• • “Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought
out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of life [that] a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.”  {blog 11/2016}

blithering idiot Donald J. Trump
real estate tycoon Donald J. Trump Page
Emperor Donald J. Trump, 2017-2020 Page
loser Donald Trump, 2021 forward Page
Emperor Trump's Swamp Cabinet Page
'RussiaGate' Page at Spirit of America Bookstore
Donald J. Trump Quotations Page at Working Minds

Truth Matters, on Facebook
“[Donald Trump is] the biggest moronic liar America has ever known.”  {blog 10/2018}

Chairman Mao Tse-tung [1893-1976]
• • “A revolution is not a dinner party, [it is] an insurrection, an act of violence.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “Learn from the masses, and then teach them.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “In waking a tiger, use a long stick.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “All political power emanates from the barrel of a gun.” - in 1927  {blog 10/2018}
• • “You can't smell the roses from a galloping horse.”  {blog 7/2024}

abolitionist Harriet Tubman [1822-1913]
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience,
and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”  {blog 11/2020}

Barbara Tuchman [1912-89]
“Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.”  {blog 6/2012}

journalist Karen Tumulty
“Trump [is] never wrong, never sorry, never responsible.”  {blog 9/2016}

Ivan Turgenev [1818-83]
“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.”   {blog 6/2011}

British computer genius Alan Turing [1912-54]
• • “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “Sometimes it's the people [that] no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”  {blog 11/2015}

psychologist Sherry Turkle (of M.I.T.)
“We are no longer nourished but somehow consumed by what we have created [on the internet].”  {blog 5/2015}

entrepreneur Ted Turner
“If I only had a little humility I would be perfect.”  {blog 2/2021}

Bishop Desmond Tutu
• • “I am a prisoner of optimism.”  {Issue #38}
• • “To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.”  {blog 7/2010}
• • “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes.
When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “We say a person is a person through other persons. You can’t be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships.”  {blog 3/2018}

American humorist Mark Twain [1835-1910]
Mark Twain Quotations Page at Working Minds
Mark Twain Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

cartoonist Frank Tyger
• • “Progress is not created by contented people.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “Wishes cost nothing unless you want them to come true.”  {blog 12/2011}

film critic Kenneth Tynan [1927-80]
• • “A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Most critics are educated beyond their intelligence.”  {blog 4/2016}

boxer Mike Tyson
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”  {blog 7/2018}

astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson
• • “The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”  {blog 9/2015 & 7/2024}
• • “There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.”  {blog 8/2023}
• • “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”  {blog 12/2024}

Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.], author of 'The Art of War'
• • “He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”  {blog 7/2017}
• • “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”  {blog 1/2018}

Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop.”  {blog 7/2022}

Stewart Udall [1920-2010]
“Some of the most important battles aren’t necessarily the ones that will be won in your lifetime.”  {blog 6/2019}

Lt. Uhura character, on the 'Star Trek' TV series
“You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words.”  {blog 3/2015}

Ernestine Ulmer
“Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”  {Issue #36}

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
“Well-behaved women rarely make history.”  {Issue #58}

Caliph Umar bin al-Khat'tab [583?-644]
“If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”  {blog 11/2015}

poet & philosopher Miguel de Unamuno [1864-1936]
“Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.”  {blog 9/2018}

Uncle Remus character as written by Joel Chandler Harris [1848-1908]
“You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.”  {blog 7/2016}

author John Updike [1932-2009]
• • “I'm more and more easily disgusted by the fact that we're living in this society committed to making us
spend more than we have, or more than we should, for stuff we don't really need or want, and that
furthermore is killing us slowly as well as filling all the landfills and making the birds sing less.”  {Issue #61}
• • “A healthy adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “We must write where we stand. An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.” - in 1974  {blog 8/2023}