Virtually Virtual Iceland - Personal opinion on things Icelandic, from the Sagas to the fishing industry.
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change
it.
-- Colin Wilson Never try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of your time and annoys the pig.
-- Anon. A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
- Helen Rowland This is a test. It is only a test. Had it been an actual job, you would have received raises,
promotions, and other signs of appreciation.
-- Anonymous Society and Culture The church must be the critic and guide of the state, and never its tool.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. "No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." (Calvin Coolidge) "Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear." (G. Gordon Liddy) Society and Culture
"Goodwill is the only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy." (Mrshall Field, businessman and philanthropist) Question: If you could live forever, would you and why? Answer: I would not live forever, because
we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live
forever, Where there is love there is life.
-- Gandhi I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
-- Elvis Presley "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." (E. B. White) Society and Culture Some men are born with cold feet; some acquire cold feet; and some have cold feet thrust upon
them.
-- Anonymous "See - one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other side, the other profile, is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but lusts and "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." (Bill Mahe Society and Culture
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-- John Stuart Mill Asking an incumbent member of Congress to vote for term limits is a bit like asking a chicken to
vote for Colonel Sanders.
-- Bob Inglis, 1995 Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
-- Diane Ackerman You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
-- Indira Gandhi In marriage, the bridge gets a shower. But for the groom, it's curtains! Society and Culture Health food makes me sick.
-- Calvin Trillin In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent...
-- John Connally, Secretary of Treasury under Richard Nixon, in an early 70s speech, as reported
in a contemporary "American Scholar" Children should be like waffles--you should be able to throw the first one away.
-- Mary Alice Messenger Society and Culture
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-- Carl Gustav Jung "In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for." (Paul Lutus) I shall return.
-- General Douglas MacArthur The full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
- definition of happiness by John F. Kennedy I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
-- E. B. White Society and Culture To the ass, or the sow, their own offspring appears the fairest in creation.
-- Latin Proverb The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time, and still retain the ability to function.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald Never try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of your time and annoys the pig.
-- Anon. Society and Culture
But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
- Andrew Marvell In the end, everything is a gag.
-- Charlie Chaplin The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
-- Albert Einstein He who receives an idea from me receives instruction for himself without lessening mine; as he
who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.
-- Thomas Jefferson "Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery." (Andy Warhol) Society and Culture Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead.
-- Euripides Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not
there, I go to work.
-- Robert Orben "There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." (Herman Melville) Society and Culture
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 "Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers (six if one went to Harvard)." (Edgar R. Fiedler) "If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost." (Aristotle) Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.
- Elbert Hubbard The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.
-- Anonymous Society and Culture I base my fashion sense on what doesn't itch.
-- Gilda Radner If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
-- Chekhov Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
-- Robert Frost Society and Culture
Marriage is a matter of give and take, but so far I haven't been able to find anybody who'll take
what I have to give.
-- Cass Daley Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
-- Erica Jong It is amazing at how small a price may the wedding ring be placed upon a worthless hand; but, by
the beauty of our law, what heaps of gold are indispensable to take it off!
-- Douglas Jerold, 1858 "The brighter you are, the more you have to learn." (Don Herold) If men knew all that women think, they'd be twenty times more daring.
-- Alphonse Karr Society and Culture "There cannot be a God because, if there were one, I would not believe that I was not He." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have
to shave twice a day.
-- Adlai Stevenson Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
-- George Jean Nathan Society and Culture
"Inside of a ring or out, ain't nothing wrong with going down. It's staying down that's wrong." (Muhammad Ali) He that would have the fruit must climb the tree.
-- Thomas Fuller, M.D. There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot.
-- Steven Wright "When even one American--who has done nothing wrong--is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth--then all Americans are in peril." (Harry S. Truman) I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can
write better.
- A. J. Liebling Society and Culture The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
-- Winston Churchill "Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise." (Alice Walker) He who awaits much can expect little.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez Society and Culture
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
-- Wynn Catlin, also attributed to Will Rogers The mistakes are all waiting to be made.
- chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game's opening position It ain't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.
-- Will Rogers Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?
- Niels Bohr Society and Culture What's another word for "Thesaurus?"
-- Steven Wright Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
-- James Matthew Barrie Society and Culture
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and
illiterate sport fishermen.
-- P. J. O'Rourke I'm an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker
room is the temple where they worship arrested development.
-- Russell Baker Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kierkegaard When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment... it's
exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.
-- Margaret Thatcher, on the Falklands Conflict Society and Culture "The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." (Viktor E. Frankl) "Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) Flowers are words which even a baby can understand.
-- Arthur C. Coxe Society and Culture
Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.
-- Carol Burnett Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The
gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-- Thomas Arnold Bennet "Everything in my life has been determined by mistakes." (Gene Wilder) He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
- Abraham Lincoln You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
-- Henry Ford Society and Culture The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with
the wish to teach himself.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." (Henry B. Adams) Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.
-- Patricia Sampson Society and Culture
