John > John's Quotes

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science."
" What are they?" asked Cotta.
"Ignorance and folly," replied Aristaeus.”
― Anatole France, Thaïs

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

“Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second series

“[I'm] as broke as the ten commandments.”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”
― PG Wodehouse

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”
― James Branch Cabell

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
― H.L. Mencken

“And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.”
― John le Carré