Here is this month’s selection of recently encountered quotes …
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
[JRR Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring]
Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.
[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]
There were a lot of fools at that conference – pompous fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them, and try to help them out.
[Richard Feynman]
What’s the difference between prose and poetry? The most parsimonious explanation is this: a poet dictates where the lines end.
[Simon Barnes; Anthony Powell Society Newsletter; Spring 2025]
A Naturist is simply a human being without “Artificial Additives”.
[Leah Crowley]
I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunization. So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunized.
[Roald Dahl]
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]
Politicians sometimes have trouble believing in the reality of things that can’t be intimidated, co-opted, or bought off. Fools, as I say.
[Derek Lowe, Science.org]
I hate small talks. I wanna talk about atoms, death, aliens, sex, magic, intellect, the meaning of life, faraway galaxies, the lies you’ve told, your flaws, your favourite scents, your childhood, what keeps you up at night, your insecurity and fears. I like people with depth, who speak with emotion, a twisted mind. I don’t want to know “what’s up”.
[unknown]
What if plants are actually farming us, giving us oxygen until we expire and turn into manure (their food) which they can consume?
[unknown]
If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.
[Abraham Lincoln]
By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise.
[Derek Thompson; The Atlantic; 03/04/2025]
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.
[Edward R Murrow]