Quotable Quotes
Please let me know if any of these are inaccurate or misattributed.
Swords
- “I gave ’em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”
- Richard M. Nixon
- “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.”
- Confucius
- “There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- “The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.”
- Marty Feldman
- “There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.”
- Ulysses S Grant
- “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.”
- Rabindranath Tagore
- “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”
- Mark Twain
Combat
- “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Scottish Quotes
- “Better be ill spoken of by one before all than by all before one.”
- Scottish Proverb
- “What may be done at any time will be done at no time.”
- Scottish Proverb
Other Quotes
- “Maybe it’s not your job to know if you suck or not.”
- Jeff Tweedy
- “Actually my great-great-grandfather was really a hermit and invented socializing just as a joke.”
- Steven Wright
- “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
- George Orwell
- “Now people pursue rock music, and they go, ‘I have something important to say, and here's what it is, and ooh, I'm singing it from my heart, too.’ And it's all too serious. And people totally miss out. They totally miss the fun, Jabberwocky, fun-with-language, fun-with-poetry.”
- Frank Black
- “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
- Helen Keller
- “I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.”
- Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
- “My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it.”
- Katherine Anne Porter
- “…If you're in a position to get that kind of attention, I think you should just be happy and not imbue it with any more weight than it should have. It doesn't make you any better at what you do. And I would trade any award I've ever gotten or ever will get for five minutes of undiluted inspiration…”
- Steven Soderbergh (via JennaElfman.com)
- “You will readily understand why people will go to any lengths to get in the film to cover themselves with any old film scrap . . junky . . narcotics agent . . thief . . informer . . anything to avoid the hopeless dead-end horror of being just who and where you all are: dying animals on a doomed planet.”
- William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 1962.
- “…writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
- Pico Iyer
- “I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”
- Boris Pasternak
- “To renounce a full life and all its joys in order to escape pain is neither Christian nor human.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own.”
- Bhagavad Gita
- “What kind of people lie in general, other than apes?”
- Katie Couric, Today Show 28th January 2004
- “We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are risen apes.”
- Desmond Morris, British zoologist and writer
- “"*uncorks bottle* here's to knowing who you can trust."”
- Matthew Barbour
- “Here’s the deal: while all ideas are valid, not all are good.”
- Songwriting Tip of the Day for December 16, 2003, from Harmony Central
- “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
- Gustave Flaubert
- “It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.”
- André (Paul-Guillaume) Gide
- “One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
- André (Paul-Guillaume) Gide
- “Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.’
- Said by Queen Elizabeth I to her subjects near the end of her reign
- “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
- Herman Melville
- “A faculty for idleness implies … a strong sense of personal identity.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- “I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file drawer labeled ’science Fiction’ … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- “What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.”
- Ivan Turgenev
- “We sit in the mud and reach for the stars.”
- Ivan Turgenev
- “In art, I am utterly committed. Art is an anti-destiny.”
- Malraux
- “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
- H.G. Wells
- “I don’t care too much about music. What I like is sounds.”
- Dizzy Gillespie
- “If it’s your job to hunt Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, then it’s your job to know that they don’t hang out with Jewish lesbians in San Francisco.”
- Kate Rafael, a California peace activist, on the FBI’s kinder, gentler investigations. (CBS News)
- “I think that’s how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, ‘Gee, I’m enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn’t cold enough. Let’s go west.’”
- Richard Jeni
- “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
- Blaise Pascal
- “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.”
- Chinese Proverb
- “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough!”
- Charlie Parker
- “We’re a destination culture, not a journey culture.”
- Bonnie Griffin
- “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
- Benjamin Franklin
- “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
- Tho. Jefferson
- “Today you will play jazz, tomorrow you will betray your country.”
- Soviet propaganda poster in the 1930s (From a Tom Waits interview).
- “Only now, especially after the tale of my marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.”
- Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, writing to his brother.
- “The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.”
- William Carlos Williams
- “A Hacker is any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent imitations.”
- Robert Bickford
- “Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing… Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
”
- E.L. Doctorow
To Calligraph
- “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.”
- Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”
- “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.”
- Christopher Morley
- “A person should hear music, read poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”
- Katherine Hepburn
Led Zeppelin
- “People ask, ‘What was it like when you wrote Stairway to Heaven?’ As if three wisemen had come knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, are you writing Stairway to Heaven here?’”
- John Paul Jones, 1990
- “I can remember Bonzo, Plant, Page and Jones out on the lawn listening to playbacks of “D’Yer Mak’er” and “Dancing Days” all walking like Groucho Marx in sync, with back steps and foward steps in time to the music like kids.”
- Eddie Kramer, Recording Engineer
- “I bet you can’t play slide piano.”
- Jimmy Page, challenging Tori Amos
- “…I enjoy making noise as much as I enjoy playing acoustic guitar.”
- Jimmy Page, in the December 1994 issue of Vox
- “I’m not a bloody blues guitarist. I’m a guitarist.”
- Jimmy Page, in the December 1994 issue of Vox
- “I don’t know that I feel anything like that really. You see, if you aim for the marketplace 100%, like Jimmy Page did, or Robert Plant particularly did, if you aim for the marketplace 100% and you don’t get it, then that’s a failure of intelligence because you’ve got, say with Plant, you’ve got a pop talent that’s massive there, there’s a massive talent. He knows how to take an old blues song that’s been around for a hundred years, and turn it into something that’s immediately AM radio for 18 year-olds. That’s a huge pop talent. If you go for that and you fail, you fail because you haven’t got it upstairs. That’s to say, if you’ve got the amount of talent that he’s got vocally, and as a stage performer. But mine… Jesus, I wouldn’t think… you see, I’m such an oddball. The longer I live the more I know that I could never have got through, never… what did you say?”
- Roy Harper