He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife.

There is no fool to the old fool.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back the when it begins to rain.

Don't get mad, get even.

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

"The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them."

The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

"You little (such a one who, while wearing a copper nose ring, stands in a footbath atop Mount Raruaruaha during a heavy thunderstorm and shouts that Alohura, Goddess of Lightning, has the facial features of a diseased uloruaha root)!"

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

Mike: "The Fourth Dimension is a shambles?" Bernie: "Nobody ever empties the ashtrays. People are SO inconsiderate."

Why are you doing this to me? Because knowledge is torture, and there must be awareness before there is change.

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

Political history is far too criminal a subject to be a fit thing to teach children.

The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanent

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What t

To use violence is to already be defeated.

History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of t

If you catch a man, throw him back.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.

It's easier to be a liberal a long way from home.

Mate, this parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it!

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

My own life has been spent chronicling the rise and fall of human systems, and I am convinced that we are terribly vulnerable. ... We should be reluctant to turn back upon the frontier of this epoch. Space is indifferent to what we do; it has no fe

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.

Gone With The Wind LITE(tm)

Too much is just enough.

Inglish Spocken Hier: some mangled translations Sign on a cathedral in Spain: It is forbidden to enter a woman, even a foreigner if dressed as a man. Above the enterance to a Cairo bar: Unaccompanied ladies not admitted unless with husb

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

... we must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

I had never been too political, but I knew how white people treated black people and it was hard for me to come back to the bullshit white people put a black person through in this country. To realize you don't have any power to make things differen

Never trust an automatic pistol or a D.A.'s deal.

The `loner' may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.

I am convinced that the truest act of courage is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others.

If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

My father was a creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

Come home America.

According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to live in America is the city of Pittsburgh. The city of New York came in twenty-fifth. Here in New York we really don't care too much. Because we know that we could beat up their

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. [There is no great genius without some touch of madness.]

I know not how I came into this, shall I call it a dying life or a living death?

A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.

Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

That Xanthippe's husband should have become so great a philosopher is remarkable. Amid all the scolding, to be able to think! But he could not write: that was impossible. Socrates has not left us a single book.

Since everything in life is but an experience perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.

Usually, when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really."

Inglish Spocken Hier: some mangled translations Sign on a cabin door of a Soviet Black Sea cruise liner: Helpsavering apparata in emergings behold many whistles! Associate the stringing apparata about the bosums and meet behind, flee then t

I'm going to Vietnam at the request of the White House. President Johnson says a war isn't really a war without my jokes.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

Calvin Coolidge looks as if he had been weaned on a pickle.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty [...] I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman... not enough to support a man and fiv

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

There is no cure for birth and death other than to enjoy the interval.

You don't move to Edina, you achieve Edina.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

The Angels want to wear my red shoes.

If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs around your home are too difficult to tackle. So, when your furnace explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it. The "professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on t

"She said, `I know you ... you cannot sing'. I said, `That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'"

A Tale of Two Cities LITE(tm)

Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders.

Perhaps the remembrance of these things will prove a source of future pleasure.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better.

All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.

Alea iacta est. [The die is cast]

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Sometimes, too long is too long.