Gray Watson's Miscellaneous Quote List

Newest to the collection come first.

• [Talking about the struggle for civil rights.] If you're not angry, you're either a stone or you're too sick to be angry... [But] you must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer -- it eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So you said angry, yes. You write it, you paint it, you dance it, you march it, you vote it, you do everything about it. You talk it -- never stop talking it. -- Maya Angelou on Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts
Courage [is] the most important of all of the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. -- Maya Angelou on Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts
• Courage [is] the most important of all of the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. -- Maya Angelou on Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts
• It ain't all buttons and charts little albatross. You know what the first rule of flyin' is? Love. You can know all the math in the 'verse, but take a boat in the air you don't love and she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down. Tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her home. -- Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Serenity
• Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist. -- John D. MacDonald, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
• Criticizing reporters is like boo-ing at the Special Olympics. -- Triumph the insult comic dog at the Michael Jackson trial.
• Inventories can be managed, but people must be led. -- Ross Perot
• The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. -- Ross Perot
• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein
• Here we have a country whose urban population happily inhales a bewildering cocktail of combustion fumes on a daily basis; 12 per cent of whose male population under the age of 35 will die prematurely as a result of smoking tobacco (a more unpleasant death than anthrax, which is mostly shock); not to mention that anthrax is harder to contract than lung cancer, with both a cure and a vaccine. Yet, let one man in Florida die of that obscure ailment and suddenly war-surplus stores are selling out of Israeli gas masks at 110 bucks a pop. -- John MacLachlan Gray, Globe and Mail, October 17, 2001 commenting on the 2001 anthrax scares.
• If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. -- Sir Peter Ustinov
• I view professional extreme athletes with, at worst, mild puzzlement and, at best, genuine respect. But what pisses me off are the amateur extreme athletes, who don't just risk their own lives -- they make some park ranger, fireman, or cop risk his life to save them. Every time I see a soldier who enlisted so he could defend his country, end up having to put his neck on the line, rappelling off a helicopter to save some middle-aged hero-wannabe jagoff who skied 20 miles off the clearly marked trail just so he can have a better pickup line than, "Hey, baby, your place or my moms?", I can't help but hope that just this one time, the kid from the National Guard is going to change his mind and chopper away to get a well-deserved beer, but not before getting just close enough to shout, "Hey, asshole, Charles Darwin says hi." -- Dennis Miller's rant from April 6th, 2001.
• I've started referring to the proposed action against Iraq as Desert Storm 1.1, since it reminds me of a Microsoft upgrade: it's expensive, most people aren't sure they want it, and it probably won't work. -- Kevin G. Barkes 2002
• After filing the largest corporate bankruptcy in history, Worldcom stock closed at $0.14 on Monday which leaves consumers with the dilemma. Do you buy one share of Worldcom stock, or 2 minutes of MCI long distance? Dennis Miller Live 07/26/2002.
• After September 11th, freedom of speech in America has become a topic that's touchier than a Vatican summer camp. -- Dennis Miller Live 5/3/2002.
• Do you realize that when Crown Price Abdula of Saudi Arabia arrived in Texas this week to meet with President Bush, he demanded that no female air traffic controller be allowed to land his flight. Hey Abdula, I don't think anybody from Saudi Arabia should be telling us how to land a jet anytime soon. -- Dennis Miller Live 5/3/2002.
• [continued from above] And by the way my friend, congratulations, just when I thought it was impossible for you to alienate us any more, you come through with this misogynistic hall of famer. Look you lucky to have been born right above where all the dinosaurs died, fat jerk. When you come here to visit, you're in our tent okay? So just pick up the fork and go with the flow. Don't tell us what to do. -- Dennis Miller Live 5/3/2002.
• For me there is no more reassuring proof that America is not fundamentally changed since September 11, than the stirring site of a shiny, suited executive simultaneously screaming into his cellphone, flipping me the bird, and screeching through an 80mph left turn, through a red light in his black sperm whale size SUV, sporting two tiny American flags. -- Dennis Miller Live 2/1/2002.
• This is the world we live in, And these are the hands we're given, Use them and let's start trying, To make it a place worth living in. -- Genesis, Land of Confusion, Invisible Touch
• No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred -- Barbara Kingsolver commenting on US reprisals for the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.
• Obscenity is the last refuge of the inarticulate motherfucker -- Bernard Levy
• American's could be any more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -- Dennis Miller 2001/03/09 rant
• Even the best psychiatrist is like a blindfolded auto mechanic poking around under your hood with a giant foam "We're #1" finger. -- Dennis Miller 2001/03/09 rant
• You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all singing all dancing crap of the world. -- Tyler Durden from the movie Fight Club.
• If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait. -- Eben Moglen, FSF council, on the encryption wars, Napster, GNUtella, etc..
• All [Public Relations] stuff is made up from lies, sawdust and wood shavings mixed in warm water, dried in a spin drier, and gently toasted in a waffle iron. Eaten, digested, and recreated in full in the lavatory pan, before being pressed flat, folded, and popped in the [mail] to us merry journalists..." -- unknown
• It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. -- Andrew Jackson
• I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop. -- Thomas Henry Huxley
• Andrew, you have 3 seconds to cut this man's scrotum off. -- Said to Andrew R. Watson Intern extraordinaire during his 1st 12 hours of surgical internship.
• One great and growing sin of a national character is an inordinate desire to get rich and rich in a hurry. As wealth is the only aristocracy in America, every man seems bent on attaining to that important distinction. The 'haste to get rich' fosters a speculative spirit, and men rush hap-hazard into schemes for the sudden acquisition of wealth. Bubbles are blown, consequently, all around us. The man who amasses wealth thus suddenly rarely retains it, while his momentary success lures thousands to the same delusive pursuits. What can be more fatal to society than such practices? -- Scientific American, June 1850
• Men learn to love the person that they are attracted to ... and women become more and more attracted to the person they love. -- From the movie Sex Lies and Video Tape.
• You may tiddle a monkey till he befouls your trenchud. -- S.E. Gloss from the definition of tiddle (sic) in the Oxford English Dictionary abridged (i.e. 3 huge volumes with a complementary magnifying glass). It is interesting to note that the word 'trenchud' could not be found in the dictionary.
• Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master. -- Emo Philips
• [Re: masterbation] Let's just say that when I was 14, I was treated for tennis elbow and I didn't even own a fucking racket. [Audience laughs...] Let ye who has a free hand cast the first stone. -- Dennis Miller Live, HBO, 7/24/99
• You know, love might make the world go round folks, but sex certainly greases the polls... Sex [...] come[s] with more strings attached than Gepetto's mistress. -- Dennis Miller Live, HBO, 7/24/99
• Isn't the best way to save face to keep the lower part shut? -- Steven Wright
• If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be: "meetings". -- Dave Berry
• Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn't happen, if they all had to use hammers and knives? -- John D. MacDonald, The Scarlet Ruse
• The true nature of a heart is seen in its response to the unattractive. -- unknown [ great page on the rose from snopes.com ]
• To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the admiration of little children...this is to have succeeded. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality. -- John D. MacDonald, The Long Lavender Look
• I've got news for you, ladies: looking to men for stability is like going to Crispin Glover for psychoanalysis. -- Dennis Miller
• When you reach the end zone, act like you've been there before. -- Attributed to legendary football coach Paul Brown. Also attributed to Coach Joe Paterno, Coach Tom Landry, and others.
• I've learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. -- unknown
• Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions. -- Woody Allen
• Don't let your education interfere with your intelligence. -- unknown
• You never really understand a person until you consider things from [their] point of view. -- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention. -- Richard Moss, M.D.
• Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau (1854)
• If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now. -- Carlo de Benedetti of Olivetti on the folly of trying to regulate information technology.
• Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. -- Howard Aiken
• Americans make money by playing `money games,' namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth ... instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value. -- Akio Morita, chairman of Sony
• I would advise people not to have sex while driving to work on Monday mornings. -- Dr. Robert Peters of the University of Maryland, commenting on recent research on heart attack risk factors
• Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends. -- Michael Ventura
• When you don't know where you're going, any gust of wind will take you there. -- George Will
• I would rather adventure with a certainty of excitement and the chance of greatness then complacently drift with the ordinary. -- Mark Ravitch, M.D.
• I mean, don't peel a strip of fat from a cow's ass and suck on it. -- Andrew R. Watson, medical student at Columbia when asked what he has learned in his first year nutrition class (1993)
• Some might say that I'm a lost man in a lost world. -- Sting, If I ever lose my faith in you (1993)
• Operated by professionals. Do not try at home. See your dealer for details. Your mileage may vary. Call before digging. Best if eaten by date on package. Apply only to affected area. Batteries not included. Member FDIC. -- M. Master .sig
• Incompetence is a double-edged banana. -- John Perry Barlow, Crime And Puzzlement
• A little sunlight is the best disinfectant. -- Justice Louis Brandeis
• Washington D.C. has lawyers like New York City has rats. I guess New York got to pick first. -- David Letterman (1994)
• The requirements for admission to practice law include completion of general education at the university level; completion of a three-year postgraduate law school curriculum; passing a two- or three-day written bar examination; and proof of satisfactory character, the latter requirement being minimal. -- G.C. Hazard Jr. and Michele Taruffo American Civil Procedure (1993)
• There is nothing wrong with you that some Prosac and a polo mallet wouldn't fix. -- Woody Allen: the movie New York Murder Mystery
• Pat Buchanan is so homo-phobic, he blames global warming on the AIDS quilt. -- Dennis Miller

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