Smart Mouths

Nothing's secret in the ladies' loo.
                                           —Elizabeth George.

We will not attain sustainability until we learn to love both nature and people.
                —Daniel B. Botkin, author of Discordant Harmonies:
                    A New Ecology for the 21^st Century

Nature is wont to hide herself.
                                             —Heraclitus.

Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.
                                                                —Fran Lebowitz.

The big problems in the world are the problems of fundamentalism and religion—whether it’s Islamic or in other forms of religion. Those are the great destabilizing forces in the world today.
                                                                —Jacques Vallee.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.
                                                                —Pascal.

You play Bach your way. I'll play Bach his way.
                                             —Wanda Landowska to Roselyn Tureck.

They [the Woodstock generation] are all searching for the necklace that’s around their necks. Eventually they’ll look in the mirror and see it.
                                                                —Swami Satchidananda.

The source of the word "humorist" is one who regards human beings in terms of their humors—you know, whether they’re sanguine or full of yellow bile, or whatever the four classical humors are. You stand back from people and regard them as types. And one finds, especially by the time one reaches one’s fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with.
                                —P.J. O’Rourke, in The Atlantic Monthly.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
                                                                —Fran Lebowitz.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
                                                                —Oscar Wilde.

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
                                                                —Emerson.

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
                                                                —Frank Dane.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
                                                                —Gandhi.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: ‘Only stand out of my light.’ Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
                                                                —John W. Gardner.

Civilization, [Marshall McLuhan] says, proceeded through four major stages. The earliest oral tribal cultures were superseded by the technology of the alphabet, which led to the concept of the individual, because writing is a visual medium; we don’t read collectively, but alone. The invention of moveable type drove the linear development of civilization, as well as concepts of nationhood and conquest, while the technology of the new media–the multimedia–has returned society to an acoustic, oral tribalism. The mode of society’s communication is for McLuhan much more significant than its content. Behind the effects lie the pattern, and it is the pattern with which McLuhan concerned himself. It is the pattern, he says, in which we see where we really are.
                —Tim Cumming, "The Strange Afterlife of Marshall McLuhan."

The irrational fear that straight men show toward gay men comes largely from the fear by straight men that gay men will do to them exactly what they do to women: objectify, and penetrate.
                —Paraphrase of an idea of Richard Goldstein.

Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.
                                                                —George W. Bush.

Still above room temperature.
                —Tuli Kupferberg’s standard reply, when asked how he is.