I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies
THOMAS JEFFERSON
A banker is a person who is willing to make you a loan if you present sufficient evidence to show you don’t need it.
HERBERT V. PROCHNOW Vice-President of the First National bank of Chicago and author of The Toastmaster’s Handbook (1949).
A banker need not be popular. Indeed, a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked.
J. K. GALBRAITH
If you would like to know the value of money, try to borrow some.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible because dreams offer too little collateral.
WALT DISNEY
Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owner.
E. JOSEPH COSSMAN
When the candles are out, all women are fair.
PLUTARCH
All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example.
JOHN RUSKIN
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
WALLACE STEVENS
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.
GWYNETH PALTROW
Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not the colour, but to accept God’s final decision on where your lips end.
JERRY SEINFELD
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
FRANCIS BACON
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
I do not believe in ghosts, astrology, palmistry, John Cage, love, or God.
GORE VIDAL
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
DICK GREGORY African American comedian and civil rights campaigner; his 1964 autobiography, Nigger, sold seven million copies.
Maybe true. Maybe not true. Better you believe.
SHERPA SAYING
I do not believe in belief.
E. M. FORSTER
The average person today is about as credulous as was the average person in the Middle Ages.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.
GERALD BRENAN
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.
DON MARQUIS
The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset.
GEOFFREY MADAN
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
There’s nothing that can help you understand your own beliefs better than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.
FRANK CLARK Writer of the daily ‘Country Parson’ cartoon in the Des Moines Register & Tribune from 1955 until his death in 1991. It was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analysed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it.
BUDDHA
A man’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.
W. C. FIELDS
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
ISAAC ASIMOV
There are indeed secrets in the Bible, and some very subversive ones, but they are so muffled up in complications, in archaic ways of thinking, that Christianity has become incredibly difficult to explain to a modern person.
ALAN WATTS
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.
MARK TWAIN
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
THOMAS PAINE
It’s absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone could have believed that – absolute balls.
PHILIP LARKIN
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
Ye are the children of the Lord your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between the eyes for the dead.
DEUTERONOMY 14:1
A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor discover his father’s skirt.
DEUTERONOMY 22:30 This isn’t an early prohibition against cross-dressing. Discover means ‘uncover’ and the skirt is the garment the bridegroom spreads over the bride as part of the ancient Jewish marriage ceremony. So, don’t sleep with your father’s wife.
Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law.
DEUTERONOMY 27:23
The driving is like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.
2 KINGS 9:20
If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
It is to be regretted that domestication has seriously deteriorated the moral character of the duck. In a wild state, he is a faithful husband, but no sooner is he domesticated than he becomes polygamous, and makes nothing of owning ten or a dozen wives at a time.
MRS BEETON
A sparrow fluttering about the church is an antagonist which the most profound theologian in Europe is wholly unable to overcome.
SYDNEY SMITH
Swallows certainly sleep all winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river.
SAMUEL JOHNSON Quoted in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
Swans have an air of being proud, stupid and mischievous – three qualities that go well together.
DENIS DIDEROT
If only I were a bird! Ah, but eating caterpillars?
PALESTINIAN PROVERB
The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
ANDY WARHOL
A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.
FRANZ KAFKA
There are more books on books than on any other subject.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Never lend books; no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books other people have lent me.
ANATOLE FRANCE
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
GROUCHO MARX
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
WALTER BAGEHOT
I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
CARLOS FUENTES
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
JOHN RUSKIN
Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
MARK TWAIN
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
CARL SAGAN
The most difficult book I have ever read was a manual on the use of iron mangles by A. J. Thompson.
SPIKE MILLIGAN
There are only two kinds of math books. Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page.
CHEN NING YANG The best attempt yet made to describe the interactions of the subatomic particles that make up matter.
One is never obliged to write a book.
HENRI BERGSON
Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.
JOHN 21:25 THE LAST WORDS.
A book worth reading is worth buying.
JOHN RUSKIN
The covers of this book are too far apart.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Big book, big bore.
CALLIMACHUS
We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.
RAOUL VANEIGEM Situationist sloganeer and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
W. H. AUDEN
Boredom is the root of all evil.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
DOROTHY PARKER
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since half the sins of humanity are caused by fear of it.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
PAUL TILLICH
Entertainment is, in fact, the biggest cause of boredom in the modern world. The more man is entertained, the more bored he grows.
ANTHONY DANIELS
When I bore people at a party, they think it is their fault.
HENRY KISSINGER
In Zen they say: If it is boring after two minutes listen to it for four. If still boring, listen for eight or sixteen or thirty-two, and so on. Soon we discover that it is not boring at all but actually very interesting.
JOHN CAGE
Boxing isn’t a metaphor: it’s the thing itself.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.
JACK HANDY ‘Deep Thoughts’ were an integral part of the American comedy showcase Saturday Night Live in the 1990s. Handey would read the pieces off screen over soft music and gentle scenes of rural life.
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
MUHAMMAD ALI
This boxer is doing what is expected of him, bleeding from his nose.
HARRY CARPENTER
BARONESS EDITH SUMMERSKILL: Mr Cooper, have you looked in the mirror lately and seen the state of your nose? HENRY COOPER: Well, madam, have you looked in the mirror and seen the state of your nose? Boxing is my excuse. What’s yours?
LADY SUMMERSKILL The anti-boxing campaigner, doctor and socialist peer was questioning Henry Cooper about the brutalities of his sport.
Sure, there have been injuries and deaths in boxing – but none of them serious.
ALAN MINTER
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.
ROBERT FROST
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we wouldn’t.
EMERSON PUGH
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Your brain, doctor, is a culture medium for question marks!
PAUL VALÉRY
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
TOM ROBBINS
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
FRANZ KAFKA
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called the civil servant – it doesn’t work and it can’t be fired.
GENERAL SIR WALTER WALKER Senior British soldier who led a brilliant campaign in the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s using helicopters for the first time. He later became notorious for his extreme anti-Communist views, regularly expressed in letters to the Daily Telegraph.
Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
SOCRATES
It is not enough to stay busy. So, too, are the ants. The question is what you are busy about.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
CLARENCE S. DARROW
I found in running businesses that the best results come from letting high-grade people work unencumbered.
WARREN BUFFETT
The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
J. K. GALBRAITH
Thought, not money, is the real business capital, and if you know absolutely that what you are doing is right, then you are bound to accomplish it in due season.
HARVEY FIRESTONE Established Firestone, now the world’s largest tyre company, in 1900. With his close friends Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, Firestone is considered one of the three founding fathers of modern American business.
The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.
ROY L. SMITH Inspirational Methodist pastor from Minneapolis, active from the 1920s and author of many books including the twelve-volume ‘Know Your Bible’ series.
A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you’re a business failure.
JOHN PAUL GETTY
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I understand small business growth. I was one.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Butterflies are creatures of little importance and have never played much part in international commerce, either of goods or ideas.
Collins Field Guide to the Butterflies & Moths of Britain & Europe (1997)
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
RICHARD BACH Author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (1970).
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
GEORGE CARLIN
The butterfly often forgets it once was a caterpillar.
SWEDISH PROVERB