WIST

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late.

Stephen King (b. 1947) American author
On Writing, “Toolbox” (2000)
    (Source)

Literally and truly, one cannot get on well in the world without money. To be in want of it, is to pass through life with little credit or pleasure; it is to live out of the world, or to be despised if you come into it …; it is to be scrutinized by strangers, and neglected by friends; it is to be a thrall to circumstances, an exile in one’s own country.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) English writer
Table Talk, “On the Want of Money” (1822)

Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) English actor, author, director
(Attributed)

Ustinov apparently used the phrase several times, with slight variations.

• As quoted above, in International Celebrity Register (1959) [ed. Cleveland Amory]
• Also appears in Ustinov's article, "Politics and the Arts", The Atlantic, Vol. 218 (1966)
• "People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom." -- Interview with David Frost (1969)
• "I believe those who rise to the top of the political tree just didn’t have the qualifications to detain them at the bottom." (Source)

 

COSMO: I cannot kill my friend. [To his henchmen] Kill my friend.

Phil Alden Robinson (b. 1950) American screenwriter, director, producer
Sneakers (1992) [with Lawrence Lasker, Walter Parkes]

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

William James (1842-1910) American psychologist and philosopher
Principles of Psychology, ch. 9 (1890)
    (Source)