Favourite Quotes

This is a place where I will place some of my favourite quotes and quotes that I have referenced in some of my articles.

I hope that they are thought provoking, please feel free to respond with comments or other quotes.

“Little Drops of Water make the Mighty Ocean” Julia Carney

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell

This quote is an apt requiem for Hong Kong?

"If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise." Tacitus

“The Happiest Man in the World” Eddie Jaku was a German Jew born in 1920.? Miraculously he survived Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps and a death march, but his family were not so lucky and were murdered. ?In an act of defiance he finally wrote a memoir at the age of a hundred years old entitled “ The Happiest Man on Earth” which I am currently reading.? Jaku left behind the wisdom “Hate is a disease, which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you in the process”. ??What an important message for today and our children. He died on April 14 2021 aged 101 in Australia.

“A culture is no better than its woods” WH Auden

“ Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease” Frank Zappa

"Racism?is the final bastion for the incurably ignorant" Lewis Scott

“I’ve never been noticeability reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing” His Royal Highness Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh.?Addressing industrialists in 1961

“There is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.?There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.?Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.?Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn’t do it.?It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.” Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it......and Why The Rest Don’t?

INVICTUS I am the master of my fate.?I am the captain of my soul." (full text below) William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original" Sir Ken Robinson (from a TED talk, watch below;

"Nobody needs a mink coat but the mink" S. Z. Sakall (Carl the waiter in Casablanca)

“The unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant” Woody Allen

"Life is short, break the rules.?Forgive quickly, kiss slowly.?Love truly.?Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile." Mark Twain. (I feel like adding "but stay at home!")

"Man is the only animal that blushes.?Or needs to." Mark Twain

"It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature he finds it attached to the rest of the world." John Muir

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results." Albert Einstein (Why do I think this relevant to our times?)

"Going local does not mean walling off the outside world.?It means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages and serve primarily local consumers.?It means becoming more self sufficient and less dependent on imports." Michael Shuman (feels pretty topical to me during the current lock-down situation)

"Clothes make the man.?Naked people have little or no influence on society." Mark Twain

“We don't heal in isolation, but in community.” S. Kelley Harrell

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” Calvin Trillin

Quotes in Latin for me always bring to mind the poem by Wilfred Owen. The Age Old Lie “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.“ - "It is sweet and noble to die for ones country". The words first coined by the Roman poet Horace, but utilised by Owen with heavy irony. To add to further irony, Wilfred Owen was killed in action only one week before Armistice was announced and the war ended.

"Audentes fortuna juvat" - "Fortune favours the brave" Virgil (thanks to Abe for this suggestion)

"A cynic is a man that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Oscar Wilde

"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey." John Ruskin

"There’s so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to criticise the rest of us." James Truslow Adams

A few years ago I espied a rather old and wizen Hells Angel sitting on his Harley.?Frankly, he looked as if his idea of a great Saturday night now might be a long soak in a hot tub.?What caught my eye though was that emblazoned on his white tee shirt were the words “The older I get - the better I was”

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." Winston Churchill

"Apparently, one in five people are Chinese.?And there are five people in my family, so it must be one of them.?It’s either my Mum or my Dad.?Or my older brother Colin.?Or my younger brother Ho-Chan-Chu.?But I think it’s Colin." Tim Vine

"Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep." Nassim Taleb

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Mark Twain

"Too many people spend money they?haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like." Will Rogers

"We all want quiet, we all want beauty....we all need space.?Unless we have it , we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently." Octavia Hill

"We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and Pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us , soothing balms and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours." Marcel Proust

"All his leaves fall’n at length, look he stands, trunk and bough, naked strength." Alfred Lord Tennyson

"One impulse from a vernal wood, may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the ages can." William Wordsworth?

"Then sing for the Oak Tree, the monarch of the woods; Sing for the Oak Tree, that groweth green and good; That growth broad and branching within the forest shade; That groweth now, and yet shall grow, When we are lowly laid !" Mary Howitt

"Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." Rabindranath Tagore

"Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on ?" Billy Connolly

?"I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see that you are unarmed." William Shakespeare

"?I just love Chinese food.?My favourite dish is number 27." Clement Attlee

"May you live respected and die regretted." An ancient English Freemason.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter”??Martin Luther King

“There is a magic machine that sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little and builds itself. It’s called a tree”?George Monbiot

“Trees can live for hundreds of years and then exist for another thousand as a beam in a Cathedral." Peter Garthwaite OBE

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Ancient Greek Proverb