Weekly Wisdom

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

—Jane Austen

Weekly Wisdom

"If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears."

--Stephen Fry

Weekly Wisdom

"Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now--to quote myself at my most pretentious--is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language. Irreverence is easy--what's hard is wit."

--Tom Lehrer

Weekly wisdom

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

--Vladimir Nabokov

Weekly Wisdom

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

—Douglas Adams

Weekly wisdom

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

—Tom Stoppard

Weekly Wisdom

“There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

—Dorothy Parker

Weekly wisdom

“You should try everything in life once, except incest and Morris dancing.”

—Arnold Bax

Weekly wisdom

"I also don't trust Caribou anymore. They're out there, on the tundra, waiting ... Something's going down. I'm right about this."

--Joss Whedon

Weekly wisdom

"A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come."

--Det. Lester Freamon (The Wire)

Weekly wisdom

"Getting an education is a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on."

--Terry Pratchett