Great Quotes

Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant". Which is a lovely sentiment.

But he also said, "wine is bottled poetry" and that's better.

"If stupid people aren't elected next year, we're going to have one of the greatest years that we've ever had."

--Donald Trump, 8/15/2020

Requirements [for design] made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.

--Don Norman, The Design Of Everyday Things

"But, if constructing the future and setting everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present; I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."
-Marx*


*I mean Karl Marx, not one of the Marx brothers.

"It is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges." - James Baldwin

"Fun Fact: Beige, not black, is actually the color of existential dread."

-- Kate Wagner, McMansion Hell

“Please…Tell me about yourself. If you’re comfortable—“

“I’m psychotic,” Rybakov said. His enormous eyebrows twitched in confirmation, and he smiled with false modesty, like a kid who brings in his father the astronaut on career day.

“Psychotic!” Vladimir said. He tried to look encouraging. It was not uncommon for the mad Russians to give him their diagnosis right off the bat; some treated it almost like a profession or a calling in life.

(Gary Shteyngart, “The Russian Debutante’s Wife”)

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, patience, how long will that take?"

--Ed Gruberman

"In this post-Pearl Harbor world, people don't trust their fellow man the way they once did."

-Nathan Fielder

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.


This be the Verse, Philip Larkin

‘My father, of a more submissive school,
Remarks the rich themselves are always sad.
There is that sort of equalising rule;
But theirs is all the youth we might have had.’

- The Garden Party, Donald Davie

'Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot.'

- Song, John Donne

It's a great quote, one of my favourites, but it's worth remembering that Holyfield still won. 

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I loved the way it walks;
I wish I loved the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

- Wishes Of An Elderly Man, Walter Raleigh