Andrew Kennedy's Quotes Page

War - prompted by 2003 planned war in Iraq

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States

On Living Life

"Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing."
-- Helen Keller

"No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit."
-- Helen Keller

"True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable"
-- Dave Tyson Gentry

"It has been one of the great errors of our time to think that by thinking about thinking, and then talking about it, we could possibly straighten out and tidy up our minds.... It is all very well to be aware of your awareness, even proud of it, but never try to operate it. You are not up to the job."
-- Lewis Thomas in Late Night Thoughts.

"Part of Being Sane is Being a Little Bit Crazy"
-- Janet Long

"He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still."
-- Lau Tsu

"Gonna live while I'm alive / I'll sleep when I'm dead."
-- Jon Bon Jovi

"With an ironclad fist I wake up and French kiss the morning."
-- Jon Bon Jovi

"Change is inevitable; progress is optional."
-- Kate McMilan

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."
-- Woodrow Wilson

"If A is a success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X, Y is play and Z is keeping your mouth shut."
-- Albert Einstein

"The world has forgotten Y."
-- Andrew Kennedy

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein

"The whole human race suffers from three basic misconceptions. They believe they must do well; that other people must treat them kindly, nobly and do their bidding; and that conditions must be absolutely just so -- or else they become horribly depressed. It's deadly for people to feel that they must have these things. These things are contrary to the facts of life. They are preferences."
-- Dr. Albert Ellis in Civilization magazine

"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion."
-- unknown

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I think one reason we admire cats, those of us who do, is their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing - or pretend they do. Rarely do you see a cat discomfited. They have no conscience, and they never regret. Maybe we secretly envy them."
-- Barbara Webster

"People yearn for love....It is similar to a dog's relationship to the car. First, they cry because they want to get in the car. Then, as soon as the car starts to move, they cry because they want to get out. And of course, as soon as they get out, all they want to do is get back in as soon as possible. Good thing for us, dogs aren't especially musical or just imagine all the annoying songs there'd be about cars."
-- The author in Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by 18."
-- Albert Einstein

"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it."
-- William Orton

"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it."
-- Mary Little

"Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every 10 couples."
-- Neil Simon in Barefoot in the Park.

"Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation"
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

"We have more power than will; and it is often by way of excuse to ourselves that we fancy things are impossible."
-- La Rochefoucauld

"Since the concepts people live by are derived only from perceptions and from language and since the perceptions are received and interpreted only in light of earlier concepts, man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built"
-- Russell R. W. Smith

"Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself."
-- Katharine Hepburn

"Creativity is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to infant experience: the ability to create the world... When we are surprised at ourselves we are being creative, and we find we can trust our own unexpected originality."
-- British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott

"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
-- Mark Twain

"The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention."
-- Kevin Kelly in Wired

"To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
-- Linda Vaughan in the San Antonio Express-News

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
-- Unknown

"Do we have to wallow in our own conviction of how fascinating we are? ... Of all the curses of this media-driven age, I think one of the worst is our failure to see how simply human we are. Our commerce-driven culture tries to sell us stuff by appealing relentlessly to our sense of specialness, and we let the flattery go to our heads. I think that's what drove the millenium hype, if you want to know the truth. ... But [the world] didn't end, did it? And so now we can face facts and get on with our lives. We are merely human, merely mortal, merely alive for a few brief decades and then gone. Let's live with our eyes open, while we can."
-- Louise Kennedy, The Boston Globe magazine

"Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like."
-- Ernest Benn

"Pretend the entire world is a school and all the prominent people are students in your class. What's everybody up to? The popular kids are out having fun. The smart kids are reading Adam Smith. The ambitious kids are working nights and weekends. The talented kids are playing sports and rehersing for the school play. I'm drinking beer behind the Dairy Queen. And the insufferable twits? They're running for student government."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, The Spectator

"I know of only two things which are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-- Albert Einstein

"It is better keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."
-- Mark Twain.

"People do not see; they only recognize. And what they do not recognize remains invisible to them."
-- Simon Leys

"When I was a kid, some guy told me that men play at love to get sex, and women play at sex to get love. The dynamite thing is that in a healthy relationship, you can meet somewhere in the middle."
-- Mel Gibson

"We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry."
-- John Webster

"Comfort the troubled; trouble the comfortable."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"I'm all for killing animals and turning them into handbags. I just don't want to have to eat them."
-- British comedy writter and vegetarian Victoria Wood

"Minds are not vessels to be filled, but fires to be lighted."
-- Plutarch

"I once asked an enormously happy and well-matched couple who had been together for more than 40 years whether there was a secret to successful relationships and they replied that it was really quite simple: Do not take yourself too seriously and treat your partner with as much respect as you would like from him or her. But instead of trying to stick to these self-evident basics, you find men and women trying desperately to be more or less dominant, or more of less submissive, depending on the prevailing fashion, which sometimes only lasts for a few months until the next self-help potboiler comes along."
-- Andre Malan in The West Australian

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell

"Something desired through reason alone is never passionately desired."
-- Francois de la Rochefoucauld

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself."
-- Rita Mae Brown

"The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit."
-- Nelson Henderson

"It is better to be quotable than to be honest."
-- Tom Stoppard

"The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way."
-- Josh Billings

"The second day of a diet is easier than the first. By the second day, you're off it."
-- Jackie Gleason

"All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, or traffic on the freeway - but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing."
-- Peter Leschak

"Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud about."
-- Schopenhauer

"If being inside is so great, then why is your screensaver a sunset?"
-- Toyota Canada commercial

"The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth."
-- Albert Einstein

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising each time we fall."
-- Confuscius

"Men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life ... to the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge."
-- Aeschylus

"Take risks; be afraid. Continue to stretch yourself. Dream big, and be open-minded to all ideas. Take on tasks that seem well above your normal capabilities so that you will experience the highs and lows of a fulfilled life. A mediocre life is a wasted life."
-- Mark Burnett on the creation of Eco-Challenge

"The wicked leader is the one whom people despise.
The good leader is the one whom the people revere.
The great leader is the one of whom the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
-- Lao-Tzu

"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple"
-- Oscar Wilde

"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?"
-- Satchel Paige

"God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference."
-- Anon.

"University degrees are a bit like adultery: You may not want to get involved in that sort of thing, but you don't want to be thought incapable."
-- Sir Peter Imbert

"... no, you can't do that, at least not until you get tenure."
-- John Morton on getting physical with disruptive students

"To see the teacher clearly, look at the students. They are his work of art."
-- George Leonard in Mastery

"For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed."
-- Robert Ingersoll

"North America in general, and Canadian and American business specifically, desperately need leadership. Great leadership would be preferable, but almost any leadership would be better than management, which is a hollow substitute."
-- J.P. Bryan after stepping down in February 1998 as CEO of Gulf Canada

"It's a bit like Wile E. Coyote, how he walks out over the edge of the cliff and he's standing there in midair, and he never falls down until he actually looks down. I think we just all looked down."
-- John McCaul of ScotiaMcLeod surveying the markets in April 1998

"We are still barely a rounding error on Time Warner's balance sheet."
-- Michael MacMillan, chairman of Alliance Atlantis Communications in November 1998 after the merger

"Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization."
-- Jon Bentley

"Do they really think the human race is destined to sit in a field naked and unfed in front of a computer screen, talking on a cellphone all day?"
-- Sy Harding, quoted in the Globe and Mail, March 20, 2000

"Accountants, the inhabitants of counting-houses, often suffer from the illusion that it is their efforts, and not those of the production-workers, sales staff and designers, that sustain the life of the enterprise. To be sure, few businesses would survive long without an effective finance function, but on its own it is utterly worthless."
-- Steve Blinkhorn, Nature 407, p 564.

"The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have -- and that is a moral problem, not an economic one."
-- Paul Heyne

"... the greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance..."
-- Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs in his Turing Award Lecture

"Because we have achieved instant communication, we expect instant response, whether or not it's merited. The form and content of the response scarcely matter. What we're after is not so much communication as acknowledgment. To not carry a cell phone or a pager, to not have voice mail, to not be on line, is to all but declare yourself a hermit."
-- John Powers in The Boston Globe magazine.

Definition of Win 95-32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
-- Robert Wilensky, University of California

"Combining the intrusiveness of a phone call with the hassle of writing e-mail"
-- gicq Homepage

"It was like a visit by Don Corleone. I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day."
-- Netscape co-founder Marc Andressen on his 1995 meeting with Bill Gates to divide the Internet browser market

"Theory is when you understand everything, but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but you do not understand why."
-- unknown

"We may not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end."
-- Apple Computer, HAL 9000 ad for Macintosh Y2K compliance

"Failure is not an option - it comes bundled with your Microsoft product."
-- unknown

"If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."
-- Red Green

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?"
-- from the movie Deep Impact

"The environmental movment of our times was sparked by the re-release of Bambi in the 1950's."
-- from the movie The Last Days of Disco

"You've got a death wish. That's so selfish. I have one, too, but I direct it toward others..."
-- Lisa Kudrow in the movie The Opposite of Sex

"Lets hope they make better babies than they do records."
-- Boy George on the pregnancy of two of the Spice Girls

"I don't want my body to be a distraction from my talent or my brain."
-- Shania Twain being somewhat naive

"Raises serious doubts about whether humanity is worth saving."
-- Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy on Armageddon

"The guy's got a girl's name and he wears makeup. What an original idea."
-- Alice Cooper on Marilyn Manson

"Matt and Ben are off on their own trip... I'm happy to see them skyrocket in to their own egotistical oblivion. I wish them the best in whatever they do."
-- Minnie Driver on ex Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, being not-bitter

"Matt's the first guy I'd call if I woke up in a hotel room with a dead hooker."
-- Ben Affleck proving Driver's case

"I tell you, if I was on the Dark Side, I'd organize my forces a hell of lot better than they did."
-- Paul Fieguth on the Dark Side in Star Wars

"Right now I'm planning to postpone having fun until after I'm dead."
-- Paul Fieguth

"I'm an idiot!"
-- Paul Fieguth

"Damn Policy 33!"
-- Paul Fieguth