- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony. Please feel free to browse and borrow.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (5,948)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,716)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,503)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,847)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,580)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (3,804)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,743)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,606)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (3,033)
- “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,997)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 20-Mar-20 - Post, alt.fan.pratchett (14 Jun 1998) | WIST on (Attributed).
- 16-Mar-20 - Quoted in Washington Post (23 Dec 1973) | WIST on (Attributed).
- 4-Mar-20 - (Attributed) | WIST on Walden (1854).
- 24-Feb-20 - "Pushkin and Pugachev [Пушкин и Пугачев]" (1937) | WIST on (Attributed).
- 22-Feb-20 - Defending Health Freedom: from informed-consent to implied consent – Nature of Healing on Letter to Henry L. Sprague (26 Jan 1900).
- 12-Feb-20 - "What I Believe," The Nation (16 Jul 1938) | WIST on Letter to Bp. Mandell Creighton (3 Apr 1887).
Quotations about male
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
MEG: They’re either married or gay. And if they’re not gay, they’ve just broken up with the most wonderful woman in the world, or they’ve just broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me. They’re in transition from a monogamous relationship and they need more space. Or they’re tired of space, but they just can’t commit. Or they want to commit, but they’re afraid to get close. They want to get close, you don’t want to get near them.
Lawrence Kasdan (b. 1949) American screenwriter, director, producer
The Big Chill (1983) [written with Barbara Benedek]
Regarding men.
Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.
Ben Aaronovitch (b. 1964) British author
Whispers Under Ground (2012)
The problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
Robin Williams (1951-2014) American comedian and actor
(Attributed)
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer
Friday [Friday Jones] (1982)
Properly regarded, male vanity is a virtue, not a vice. Treated correctly, it makes him enormously pleasanter to deal with.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer
Friday [Friday Jones] (1982)
No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) First Lady of the US (1933-45), politician, diplomat, activist
If You Ask Me (1946)
“The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord.”
Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. “Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Unseen Academicals (2009)
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex; regard us then as Beings placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
Abigail Adams (1744-1818) American correspondent, First Lady (1797-1801)
Letter to John Adams (31 Mar 1776)
There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.
Martial (AD c.39-c.103) Spanish Roman poet, satirist, epigrammatist [Marcus Valerius Martialis]
Epigrams [Epigrammata], Book 10, # 83
Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French moralist
Pensées (1838) [ed. Auster (1983)]
