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A "quotation source" is anything from which a quotation can be drawn, such as a book, poem, play, film, tv show, essay, etc. Some quotations, such as proverbs, will not have a source. For more information about entering quotations in Freebase, see the page for the "quotation" type.
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Filter this Collection| x name | x image | x Quotations | x article |
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| x Henry VI, part 2 |
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First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. |
Henry VI, Part 2 or The Second Part of Henry the Sixt (often written as 2 Henry VI) is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1591, and set during the lifetime of King Henry VI of England. Whereas 1 Henry VI deals...
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| x The Tempest |
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...O brave new world, That has such people in't! |
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place, using illusion and skilful...
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| We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life, is rounded with a sleep. | |||
| Let's not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone. | |||
| What’s past is prologue | |||
| Your tale, sir, would cure deafness. | |||
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| x The Luck of the Bodkins | ...the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. |
The Luck of the Bodkins is a novel by P.G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on October 11, 1935 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on January 3, 1936 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston. The two editions are...
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| A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard. | |||
| x Sudden Death | Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. | ||
| x The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do to Make Them Right | An individual's reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong... |
In The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner identifies the roots of catastrophe, the small, perfectly sensible steps that set the stage for disaster. In incisive analysis of real-life situations and often hilarious computer simulations he helps...
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| By labeling a bundle of problems with a single conceptual label, we make dealing with that problem easier - provided we're not interested in solving it. | |||
| x Repo Man |
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The more you drive, the less intelligent you are. |
Repo Man is a 1984 cult film directed by Alex Cox. It was produced by Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy, with executive producer Michael Nesmith, and stars Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez.
Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), a young punk rocker...
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| x Breakfast of Champions |
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New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. |
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the fictional town of Midland City, it is the story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." One of...
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| x Contact |
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A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. |
Contact is a science fiction novel written by Carl Sagan and published in 1985. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on the 1985 U.S. bestseller list....
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| x The Terminator |
The Terminator is a 1984 American science fiction action film directed by James Cameron, co-written by Cameron and William Wisher Jr. and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. The film was produced by Hemdale Film...
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| x Critique of Practical Reason |
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Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe... |
The Critique of Practical Reason (German: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) is the second of Immanuel Kant's three critiques, first published in 1788. It follows on from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and deals with his moral philosophy.
The second...
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| x 2001: A Space Odyssey |
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It can only be attributable to human error. |
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was partially inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". Clarke later adapted the...
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| I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. | |||
| Open the pod bay doors, HAL. | |||
| I'm sorry Frank, I think you missed it. Queen to bishop three, bishop takes queen, knight takes bishop, mate. | |||
| I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. | |||
| x Without Feathers | What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. |
Woody Allen's Without Feathers (1975, ISBN 0-394-49743-0) is one of his best-known literary pieces. The book spent 4 months on the New York Times Bestseller List. The book is a collection of short stories and also features two one act plays, Death...
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| x The Blind Watchmaker | However many ways there are of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. |
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design is a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins in which he presents an explanation of, and argument for, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. He also presents...
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| x The Point! | A point in every direction is the same as no point at all. |
The Point! is a fable and the sixth album by American songwriter and musician Harry Nilsson about a boy named Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where by law everyone and everything had to have a point.
There have been, so...
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| x Steps to an Ecology of Mind | Information...is a difference that makes a difference. |
Steps to an Ecology of Mind is a collection of Gregory Bateson's short works over his long and varied career. Subject matter includes essays on anthropology, cybernetics, psychiatry and epistemology. It was originally published by Chandler...
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| x A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics | The map is not the territory. | ||
| x Quality Software Management Volume 1: Systems Thinking | Quality is value to some person. | ||
| x Usenet |
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PrepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat's artThe adjBig nProblem? |
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.
Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was...
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| x Essays: First Series | A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. | ||
| x Four Quartets | For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. |
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's...
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| We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. | |||
| x Wired | The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind, it’s much better to remove things. |
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San...
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| Ethanol is for drinking, not driving | |||
| x Revelations of Divine Love | Sin is behovely, but all shall be well... |
The Revelations of Divine Love (which also bears the title A Revelation of Love — in Sixteen Shewings above the first chapter) is a book of Christian mystical devotions written by Julian of Norwich. It is believed to be the first published book in...
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| x Tao Te Ching | The skillful traveller leaves no traces of his wheels... |
The Tao Te Ching, Dao De Jing, or Daodejing (道德經: 道 dào "way"; 德 dé "virtue"; 經 jīng "power.") also simply referred to as the Laozi, is a Chinese classic text. According to tradition, it was written around the 6th century BC by the sage Laozi (or...
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| He who stands on his tiptoes does not stand firm... | |||
| He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent... | |||
| The soft overcomes the hard; and the weak the strong. | |||
| Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao... | |||
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| x Everybody's Autobiography | There is no there there. |
Everybody's Autobiography is a book by Gertrude Stein, published in 1937.
It is a continuation of her own memoirs, picking up where The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, left off. Both were written in a less experimental, more...
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| x The Myth of Sisyphus |
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem... |
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin O'Brien followed in 1955.
The work can be seen in...
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| Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. | |||
| x Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man |
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The medium is the message. |
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1st Ed. McGraw Hill, NY, 1964; reissued MIT Press, 1994, with introduction by Lewis H. Lapham; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003 ISBN 1-58423-073-8) is a pioneering study in media theory written by Marshall...
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| We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. | |||
| x Gutenberg Galaxy | The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. | ||
| x The Bell Jar | To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. |
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often...
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| x Tender is the Night | Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure. |
Tender Is the Night is a novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his fourth and final completed novel, and was first published in Scribner's Magazine between January-April, 1934 in four issues. The title is taken from the poem "Ode to a...
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| x The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock |
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. |
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of...
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| Do I dare disturb the universe? | |||
| In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. | |||
| In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. | |||
| x The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
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…[I]n order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain. |
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the Town of "St. Petersburg", inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived.
In the 1840s an...
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| x The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. |
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980, ISBN 0-345-39181-0) is the second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction trilogy of five by Douglas Adams. It was originally published by Pan Books as a paperback. The...
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| x The Mysterious Stranger | Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time |
The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. It was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense...
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| x Last Chance to See | Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others… |
Last Chance to See is a 1989 BBC radio documentary series and its accompanying book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. In the series, Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on...
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| I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer… | |||
| x Eleonora |
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They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity; and thrill; in waking; to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret. |
"Eleonora" is a short story written by American author Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1842.
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| x Tradition and the individual talent | Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion… |
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary theorist T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published, in two parts, in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920). The...
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| x The Gold-Bug |
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It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. |
"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's...
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| x A Farewell to Arms | The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places… |
A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway concerning events during the Italian campaigns during the First World War. The book, which was first published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic...
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| x A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
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You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. |
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Some early editions are titled A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
The novel...
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| x The Salmon of Doubt | We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. |
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a posthumous collection of previously published and unpublished material by Douglas Adams. It consists largely of essays about technology and life experiences, but its major selling point...
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| x The Hollow Men | This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. |
The Hollow Men (1925) is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised:...
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| x Army of Darkness |
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Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun. |
Army of Darkness, also titled Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness or just Evil Dead III or Bruce Campbell vs Army of Darkness, is a 1992 comedy horror film directed by Sam Raimi. It is the third and final installment in The Evil Dead trilogy. The film...
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| Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that? | |||
| Gimme some sugar, baby. | |||
| x Gospel of Matthew |
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Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. |
The Gospel According to Matthew (Greek: κατὰ Ματθαῖον εὐαγγέλιον, kata Matthaion euangelion, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Ματθαῖον, to euangelion kata Matthaion) (Gospel of Matthew or simply Matthew) is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three...
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| It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God | |||
| It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. | |||
| Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. | |||
| Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. | |||
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| x Gospel of John |
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A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. |
The Gospel According to John (Greek τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον), commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus. It...
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| x Blade Runner |
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I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. |
Blade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of...
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| More human than human | |||
| The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. | |||
| x Buckaroo Banzai |
Buckaroo Banzai is the lead character, played by Peter Weller, of the eponymous 1984 cult film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
A renaissance man, the character is a top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver,...
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| x The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension |
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Remember; no matter where you go, there you are. |
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, often shortened to Buckaroo Banzai, is a parody science fiction film that was released in 1984. It was directed and produced by W. D. Richter, and concerns the efforts of the multi...
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| x Old Irish Saying | If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to. | ||
| x Ogden Nash | A flea and a fly |
Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known...
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| x Arab proverb | Trust in God, but tie your camel tight. | ||
| Lying and stealing are next door neighbors. | |||
| Pardon is the choicest flower of victory. | |||
| A wise man's day is worth a fool's life. | |||
| He who eats alone chokes alone. | |||
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| x Republican Party Reptile. The confessions, adventures, essays and (other) outrages of P.J. O'Rourke | The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say. | ||
| These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper. | |||
| The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the "Village Voice" for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America's rural areas. | |||
| I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck. | |||
| Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does. | |||
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| x All the trouble in the world. The lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death | Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes. | ||
| x Holidays in hell | To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze. | ||
| x How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink | When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose, and a teen-age lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban sidestreet. You'd have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you'll die of pure sensory overload, I'm here to tell you. | ||
| x Unleashing Janus |
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Chaos has sexy arms... |
Unleashing Janus is a science fiction by San Francisco writer Ted David Harris.Plot blurb from the back of the book:As Josh argues with his eccentric co-worker Travis about the prospects
of artificial intelligence, he never dreams he will soon get...
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| x The Mishnah | Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure. | ||
| x The Koran | The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. |
The Koran is the name of a translation of the Qur'an written by John Medows Rodwell. It uses a chronological method of sorting verses in the Koran. Rodwell's translation has not aged well with time and many find it inferior to other, more modern...
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| x VALIS | Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. |
VALIS is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick's gnostic vision of one aspect of God.
VALIS is the first book in the VALIS trilogy of novels including The Divine...
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| x Http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_maoism.html | It's not a revolution if nobody loses | ||
| x Civilization and its Discontents |
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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. |
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"). It is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works....
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