This is a collection of quotes that is still growing. If you have any comments on
these quotes, or others you'd like to share email me
but PLEASE don't send me any anonymous or self quotes.

"Moral indignation is, in most cases, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy." - Vittorio de Sica

"Come again when you can't stay so long." - Walter Sickert

"The city, 1:00am. People in their rooms, asleep, lonely, depressed. One of them gets the urge to pet a small, furry animal. That's where I come in. My name's Friday. I carry a badger." - someone's sig file

"Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years." - Simone Signoret

"You might be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." - Beverly Sills

"You can't be teased effectively by someone who isn't paying attention to who you are." - Rachel Silverman

"If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer.
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in!
Come in!" - Shel Silverstein

"Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be." - Shel Silverstein

"One two, buckle my shoe.
'Buckle your own shoe!'
Who said that?
'I did. What are you doing with those silly buckles on your shoes anyway?'
Three, four, shut the door.
'You shut it - you opened it.'
Er... five, six, pick up sticks.
'Why should I pick them up - do you think I'm your slave? Buckle my shoe, shut the door, pick up sticks, next thing you'll be telling me to lay them straight.'
But it's only a poem... Nine, ten, a big fat... oh never mind." - Shel Silverstein

"Rockabye baby, in the treetop
Don't you know a treetop
Is no safe place to rock?
And who put you up there,
And your cradle too?
Baby, I think someone down here's
Got it in for you." - Shel Silverstein

"This bridge will only take you halfway there
To those mysterious lands you long to see:
Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair
And moonlit woods where unicorns run free.
So come and walk awhile with me and share
The twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known.
But this bridge will only take you halfway there -
The last few steps you'll have to walk alone." - Shel Silverstein

"When the light is green you go.
When the light is red you stop.
But what do you do
When the light turns blue
With orange and lavender spots?" - Shel Silverstein

"Of all the music management moves ever made, the smartest might be persuading *NSYNC to drop 'Everything but the Kitch' from their name." - Brad Simanek, (stolen from Ruminations)

"People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart" - Howard Simons, The Washington Post

"Abe: I used to be with 'it'. But then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems scary and weird. It'll happen to YOU!" - The Simpsons

"Homer: The code of the schoolyard, Marge! The rules that teach a boy to be a man. Let's see. Don't tattle. Always make fun of those different from you. Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do." - The Simpsons

"C. Montgomery Burns: Family, religion, friendship: these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don't want to be driving to a maternity hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue." - The Simpsons

"The pledge of allegiance does not end with the words 'Hail Satan'." - The Simpsons

"There's something I don't like about that severed hand." - Marge Simpson, The Simpsons

"Homer: And what does my little girl want?
Lisa: An absence of mood swings and some stability in my life.
Homer: Uh... How about a pony?
Lisa: Okay!" - The Simpsons

"Bart: What the hell is this?
Lisa: It's one of those campy 70's throwbacks that appeals to Generation-X'ers.
Bart: We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little." - The Simpsons

"With $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like love." - Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

"Literature is the memory of humanity." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it." - Jerome Singer

"I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it." - Edith Sitwell

"Death: You have failed me for the last... nice shoes!" - Six-String Samurai

"I'd help the homeless. And I would be sure that everyone has a rose." - sixth grader's essay

"Every fleeting thought you've ever had in your life, no matter how bizarre, is someone's lifelong obsession. And he has a website." - Skif's Internet Theorem

"There are so many good reasons to not eat meat, it seems a shame that they're mostly subverted by crusaders such as Chrissie Hynde and Morrissey, whose biggest threat to carnivores is annoying us to death. That all the vegan blowhards have kept a pretty low profile since the latest E. Coli fiasco suggests nothing more than an inability to put one and one together publicly and jot the results down in a press release. This despite so many hot-button angles to be pushed: If AIDS is proof that God disapproves of homosexuality, where's Jerry Falwell when the bar-b-que goes bad? Indeed, between E. Coli, mad-cow syndrome, and the RBGH flap, you might get the idea that God moves not so much in mysterious ways as in bacterial ones." - E. L. Skinner, suck.com

"While sitting at home and watching sleazy porn, one question comes to my mind: What the heck would happen if a pool boy ordered a pizza??" - SkyWalker707 (stolen off of Ruminations)

"Close your eyes and forget your name. Step outside yourself and let your thoughts stray as you go insane." - Slayer

"I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination." - Jane Smiley

"To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for." - Alexander Smith

"I ain't good-lookin', but I'm somebody's angel child." - Bessie Smith

"It's a long old road, but I know I'm gonna find the end." - Bessie Smith

"If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot." - Dean Smith

"The motions of the average mind... are about as purposeful and orderly as those of a crazed monkey cavorting about his cage. Nay, more; like the prancings of a drunk, crazed monkey. Even so we have not conveyed its full restlessness; The mind is like a drunk, crazed monkey that has St. Vitus' dance. If we are to be truly accurate as to its frenzy we must go a final step; it is like a drunk, crazed monkey with St. Vitus' dance who has just been stung by a wasp." - Huston Smith, The Religions of Man

"The universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart: The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of these wishes will be granted - together, of course, with consequences." - Huston Smith, The Religions of Man

"How can they say my life isn't a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?" - Logan Pearsall Smith

"Recently, someone asked me if I believe in astrology. He seemed somewhat puzzled when I explained that the reason I don't is that I'm a Gemini." - Raymond Smullyan, 5000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies

"Adventure is the result of poor planning." - Col. Blatchford Snell

"A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car." - Carrie Snow

"Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story." - Don Snyder

"Be as you wish to seem." - Socrates

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for." - Socrates

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." - Socrates

"If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Is it always 'or'? Is it never 'and'?" - Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods

"This is ridiculous. What am I doing here? I'm in the wrong story." - Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods

"Stop worrying where you're going. Move on. If you can know where you're going, you've gone. Just keep moving on... Look at what you want, not at where you are." - Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

"I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them." - Susan Sontag

"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste." - Susan Sontag, On Photography

"What you cannot enforce, do not command." - Sophocles

"How on earth did I get so jaded? Life's mystery seems so faded." - Soul Asylum

"I'm waiting by the phone. Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone." - Soul Asylum

"Like a madman laughing at the rain - Little out of touch, little insane. Just easier than dealing with the pain." - Soul Asylum

"Once in a while I'm not myself. Once in a while I think you're someone else." - Soul Asylum

"Promised myself I wouldn't weep. One more promise I couldn't keep. It seems no one can help me now. I'm in too deep. There's no way out. This time I have really lead myself astray." - Soul Asylum

"Seems like I should be getting somewhere. Somehow I'm neither here nor there." - Soul Asylum

"There's a place for us stuck inside this fleeting moment, tucked away where no one owns it, wrapped up in a haste and by mistake got thrown away." - Soul Asylum

"Though I sometimes get annoyed I know just where I'm at. This is my song of joy." - Soul Asylum

"Though the rain weighs down your wings, still the caged bird has to sing." - Soul Asylum

"You can't believe in yourself. You can't believe in anyone else." - Soul Asylum

"You never grow out of mischief making. You never grow out of taking. You never grow out of complicating when simple things are waiting... You never grow out of contemplating when it ain't worth debating. You never grow out of mistake making. You never grow out of faking... You never grow out of fear... but I'm growing into you." - Soul Asylum

"If we could decide who we love it would be much simpler but less magical." - South Park

"Ignite your mind." - promotional video for Southern Methodist University

"My favorite rapper is M.C. Escher!" - Space Ghost, Space Ghost Coast to Coast

"Every person is a fool in somebody's opinion." - Spanish Proverb

"It is good to have friends, even in hell." - Spanish Proverb

"Speaking without thinking is shooting without taking aim." - Spanish Proverb

'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop backwards into today's, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow." - J. A. Spender

"Does Tufnel's amp still go to 11?" - Nikki Weinstein
"Nigels's amp--the famous 11 amp--it now has a little infinity symbol on it. As long as you keep turning the know, it just keeps getting louder. And we haven't really found the limit yet." - David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap in an interview in Time Out New York on May 31, 2001

"If you can say you live and learn, you're learning how to live." - Split Enz

"I could not believe that anyone who had read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have there people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?" - Bishop John Shelby Spong

"It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness." - Charles H. Spurgeon

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin

"Rambo isn't violent. I see Rambo as a philanthropist." - Sylvester Stallone

"We teach what we need to learn." - Gloria Steinem

"If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that Netnews is far more addictive than cocaine." - Rob Stampfli

"We all know how stupid the average person is. Now realize that, by definition, fifty percent of the population is dumber than that." - Ivan Stang

"Freud, living at a time when women were proving their heads were no different from men's, substituted the penis for the head as the organ of male superiority, an organ women could never prove they had." - Una Stannard, Mrs. Man

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. This is not a weakness. That is life." - Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Perhaps 'because it is there' is not sufficient reason for climbing a mountain." - Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

"You will soon learn that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on your point of view." - Star Wars

"Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's 'right to know'." - Kenneth Starr in 1987

"There's one thing worse than being alone: wishing you were." - Bob Steele

"We come. We go. And inbetween we try to understand." - Rod Steiger

"The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this; decide what you want." - Ben Stein

"When you use the phrase 'Christian Nation,' you really mean 'Christian Nation plus that one cute little Jew who writes the funny column in TIME,' right?" - Joel Stein interviewing Pat Buchanan in Time Magazine

"New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy." - John Steinbeck

"The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided." - Casey Stengal

"There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem." - Harold Stephens

"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself." - James Stephens

"When I was very young, I was disgracefully intolerant but when I passed the thirty mark I prided myself on having learned the beautiful lesson that all things were good, and equally good. That, however, was really laziness. Now, thank goodness, I've sorted out what matters and what doesn't. And I'm beginning to be intolerant again." - G.B. Stern

"Experience is a comb that life gives you after you lose your hair." - Judith Stern

"Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions." - Earl Gray Stevens

"It is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge." - Adlai Stevenson

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." - Adlai Stevenson

"Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely." - Adlai Stevenson

"Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" - woman
"That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!" - Adlai E. Stevenson (when he was running for president in 1956)

"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"The cruelest lies are often told in silence." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?" - Robert Louis Stevenson

"Can you really be as lonely as you sound?" - Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer, My One and Only

"As her tutor you have an obligation to keep her in ignorance." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

"You must not be cleverer than your elders. It is not polite." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

"The colors red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, when's it going to end?" - Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"I remember when there were no questions... Answers, yes. There were answers to everything... There were answers everywhere you looked." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Life in a box is better than no life at all." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Guildenstern: A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself... Or just as mad.
Rosencrantz: And he does both.
Guildenstern: So there you are.
Rosencrantz: Stark raving sane." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Uncertainty is the normal state." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"We're actors, we're the opposite of people!... We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching." - Jim Stovall

"You have been told that Real Life is not like college, and you have been correctly informed. Real Life is more like high school." - Meryl Streep

"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who have not got the guts to bite people themselves." - August Strindberg

"Some people seem to be born to suffer." - August Strindberg, Easter

This was written by a student applying to college. He ended up attending NYU:
"3A. ESSAY
IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college."

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