“We generally found him loaded with work to do.”
Ralph C. Maddocks (insincere letter of recommendation line about the office drunk)
“Kind of a shame kids have to grow up into people.”
Davy Crockett (played by John Wayne) in The Alamo
"Montesquieu seems, in fact, to have looked on the nature of man as entirely plastic, as passively reproducing the impressions, and submitting implicitly to the impulses, which it receives from without. And here no doubt lies the error which vitiates his system as a system. He greatly underrates the stability of human nature.... those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors, and transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows it."
Henry Sumner Maine Ancient Law (re L’Esprit des Lois)
“For ‘tis not barely the plough-man's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil, and the baker's sweat, [that] is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its being feed to be sown to its being made bread, must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an effect of that… ‘Twould be a strange catalogue of things, that industry provided and made use of, about every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dyeing-drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work; all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.”
John Locke The Second Treatise of Government (anticipating Leonard Read’s “I Pencil” by a quarter of a millennium)
“To him who is in fear everything rustles.”
Sophocles, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“The pessimists who attack the Universe are always under this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better; but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not make the sun and moon at all.”
G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan.-Feb. 2000)
“I’ll bet she’ll be speechless.”
Dave Barry Dave Barry’s Bad Habits (re his decision to get his wife a practical rather than decorative or sentimental gift, specifically a case of paper towels).
“Dare to be naive."
R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted on www.goodreads.com/quotes/37173-dare-to-be-naive