Quotations

Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms, and they'll call you crazy.
-- Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul, R. Bach

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
-- Francis Bacon

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
-- Honori de Balzac

New York is my kind of town because I have a gun.
-- Charles Barkley

Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial.
-- Sydney Biddle Barrows, the "Mayflower Madam"

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion ... In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
-- Alan Barth

You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.
-- The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
-- Charles Beard

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
-- Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria

Now comes the mystery.
-- Henry Ward Beecher, on his deathbed

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
-- Robert Benchley

Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough!
-- P.A.C. de Bequmqrcharis

... the patriotic art of lying for one's country.
-- Ambrose Bierce

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
-- Ambrose Bierce

Justice is a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
-- Ambrose Bierce

... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affection is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.
-- Josh Billings

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.
-- Otto von Bismarck, 1850

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
-- William Blackstone

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
-- William Blake

Have you ever considered that sexual orientation is more a description of tribal membership than of sexual behavior?
-- Blowfish Catalog

There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

'Tis a principle of war that when you can use the lightning, 'tis better than cannon.
-- Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.
-- Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

An army marches on its stomach.
-- Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Every ... soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack.
-- Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The greatest general is he who makes the fewest mistakes.
-- Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Ultima ratio regum. (Translation: Last argument of Kings)
-- Commonly inscribed on cannons during the Napoleonic era.

It is magnificent, but it is not war.
-- General Pierre Bosquet, on the Charge of the Light Brigade.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee

In war there is no second prize for the runner up.
-- General of the Army Omar Bradley.

Only one military organization can hold and gain ground in war -- a ground army supported by tactical aviation with supply lines guarded by the navy.
-- General of the Army Omar Bradley.

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.
-- former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Personally I have no enthusiasm for organized jeering sections but I hold that the spontaneous right of raspberry should be denied to no one in America.
-- Heywood Broun

When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
-- Elizabeth Browning

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which
The first was made.
-- Robert Browning

What's the earth,
With all its art, verse, music, worth-
Compared with love, found, gained and kept?
-- Robert Browning

[On his legal problems] What I need is a lawyer with enough juice to get Ray Charles a driver's license.
-- Lenny Bruce

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. Really.
-- Lenny Bruce

You have many years to live -- do things you're proud to remember when you're old.
-- John Brunner

I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein....
-- "Creed for Materialists", from Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

I'm coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.
-- from Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

I spent a lot of my youth in the secluded groves of Academe -- maybe that was what deluded me into thinking people would listen if I shouted at them loud enough, because my old students did at least pretend to be paying attention even if they never acted on what they were told.
-- from Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: "I can't so you mustn't," and "I can but you mustn't."
-- John Brunner

A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.
-- Lord Bryce

Dan Quayle says I'm not qualified to be President. How would he know?
-- Pat Buchanan, 02/26/92

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
-- Henry Thomas Buckle

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.
-- Buddha

A dog, I have always said is prose; a cat poetry.
-- Jean Burden

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
-- Edmund Burke

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
-- Edmund Burke

Do what thy manhood bids thee do:
From none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives and noblest dies,
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton

And when we think we lead, we are most led.
-- Lord Byron

War, war is still the cry, 'War even to the knife!'
-- Lord Byron

My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which, being finished, here the story ends;
'Tis to be wished it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun.
-- Lord Byron

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