“Economists’ work is often criticized as being ‘useful as a chocolate teapot,’ The Economist magazine wrote.”
Ottawa Citizen October 25, 1997 (though it has occurred to me since that (a) you could eat a chocolate teapot and (b) what’s really wrong with economists’ work isn’t that it’s not useful, it’s that people don’t want to hear about it... but it’s still a lovely metaphor).
“He also acknowledged that his story had a movie-of-the-week quality to it. ‘The trouble is, I’m one of the actors,’ he said. ‘It’s my life.’”
Some guy who had suffered a most peculiar and devastating misfortune, in Maclean’s August 2, 1993
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing; that’s why it’s recommended daily.”
Zig Ziglar, emailed by a friend and confirmed online e.g. at https://due.com/blog/zig-ziglar-motivation-and-baths-recommended-daily/
“She [Iris Murdoch] cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be ‘a thing among other things.’ That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either. But it is especially disconcerting in someone of the intellectual stature of Iris Murdoch.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2003
“I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going.”
“William Norman Birkett (1883-1962), British lawyer” quoted in Cy Charney The Salesperson’s Handbook
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White, emailed by a friend and confirmed online by e.g. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_b_white_106410
“Scandalous rumors concerning the state of the times had reached my ears.”
Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Charlotte F. Otten, ed. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves In Western Culture.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.