Your favorite Quotes and why!! From real people.

“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” Sir Winston Churchill

It is my favorite quote because it jives with my personal political evolution.

I reject your reality and substitute my own!

Adam Savage

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Mark Twain

Laws control the lesser man ... Right conduct controls the greater one.

Mark Twain

My heart has joined the thousand for my friend stopped running today.

Richard Adams

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Matsuo Basho

Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors.

Rudyard Kipling

"You could have the most beautiful body in the world, but if it ain't breathing, it ain't alive" - Freddie Gruber(R.I.P.), famous drum teacher talking about the art of drumming.

"There are three things in life. Lions, lambs, and dirt. What's on your menu?"

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
Anon.

a reply to: lostgirl

I know what it means.

In what way was my post, which stuck religiously to the facts of the case, disparaging, dismissive or contemptuous?

Is it not simply that you resent being corrected?

a reply to: AnonymousRider

Often stated (and I agree with the sentiment) — but not, I am afraid, by Winston Churchill.

Yes, I'm going to keep doing it. If you don't like it, take it as an incentive to check the provenance of a quote before attributing it. Or just ignore me.

a reply to: ketsuko

Laws control the lesser man ... Right conduct controls the greater one.

Not Mark Twain. This is Buddhist in sentiment and wording, if that will help you find the actual author.

Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors.

Possibly Kipling but not very likely. I'm a Kipling fan, and I don't recall seeing this anywhere. Mind you, I haven't read The Jungle Book, his best-known work, so it may be in there.

a reply to: projectbane

Thanks for your indulgence and kind words.
"The one guaranteed negative dividend for any tyrant is
his population's wasted potential." nobody special

a reply to: Astyanax

Someone said it. I was looking for quotes from Thomas Jefferson on banking.

My bad for not verifying the quote but I was being lazy.

edit on 20/5/15 by Astyanax because: he might murder me with that big gun of his.

As to your reason for edit:

I have a small caliber gun.

I won't go after you for expressing your opinion on an Internet forum.

Are you afraid of me?

a reply to: rockintitz

Are you afraid of me?

Just amusing myself at your avatar's expense.

These images we choose say a lot about us, don't they? Mostly they say things we don't intend.

a reply to: Astyanax

I'm sorry if you don't recognize my avatar picture.

It's more of a way to identify fellow travelers, than to intimidate.

I don't know what your avatar means to you, and I really don't care

a reply to: rockintitz

I'm sorry if you don't recognize my avatar picture.

I'm not. This may well be a case where ignorance is bliss.

It's more of a way to identify fellow travelers, than to intimidate.

Not to worry; I don't intimidate easy.

I don't know what your avatar means to you, and I really don't care.

But I'll tell you anyway. The woman in the picture is a friend of many years' standing. Indeed, I once courted her — unsuccessfully. She was a stunning beauty in those days, as well as a successful and critically acclaimed artist. Her family were well-off members of my country's cosmopolitan elite, her father a senior military officer.

Now she lives in India. She still paints for a living, but her obsession with the nexus of carnality and spirituality has all but consumed her. She has become an aghori or naga baba, a holy woman in an esoteric Hindu cult that seeks salvation and enlightenment through extremes of pleasure and pain. Respectable Hindus despise and fear these people, whom they consider libertines, black magicians or worse, but to her fellow devotees my friend is a saint; some even worship her as nothing less than a living goddess. This makes me grin, because back in the day my own secret nickname for her was The Angel in Human Shape.

I am a little afraid for her now, expecting daily to hear that she has died violently at the hands of a maddened disciple or as the result of some dark Tantric ritual gone wrong. Handling snakes seems to be part of her personal spiritual practice — though I hope that, for her sake, someone has de-fanged that cobra. Most of the time I've seen her with pythons, which are a lot safer for girls to play with.

"Now I'm just a small town pizza lawyer, but I do declare that wrapping these eight crispy corners of pizza in over three and a half feet of bacon is perfectly legal!"

Little Caesars small town bacon lawyer

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." ~J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, upon witnessing the first tests.

This one is simply badass.
"My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking." ~ Marshal Ferdinand Foch, WWI

"Ladies and gentleman, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." ~ Teddy Roosevelt, right after being shot at point blank range and right before proceeding to give a 90 minute speech with the bullet still inside of him.

Here's one of my all time favorite

"Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external percepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority."

Baltasar Gracian (1601 - 1658)

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: lostgirl

I know what it means.

In what way was my post, which stuck religiously to the facts of the case, disparaging, dismissive or contemptuous?

Is it not simply that you resent being corrected?

Actually, I think the case may be that you "resent" the fact that my initial reply to you made a very good point - in that...

....A. the quotes I chose are widely attributed (in many, many, published sources) to the men I genuinely believed I was quoting (in fact, I have newspaper clippings of those quotes posted on my refrigerator)...

....and B. (again) since it cannot be proven that the gentlemen in question 'never' said those things, how can you know for certain that you "stuck religiously to the facts of the case"?

I don't at all "resent being corrected", I resent the 'implication' (which, as a "writer" you should very well know that the 'tone' of your post suggested) that I would deliberately choose to post a quote, the provenance for which, should be 'well known' to be in question....

Had your correction of my quotes been stated in as gracious a manner as your correction to "AnonymousRider" -

- "Often stated (and I agree with the sentiment) - but not, I'm afraid, by Winston Churchill."...

...I would simply have replied, (with sincerity) "I was unaware of that, thank you for letting me know."

originally posted by: Astyanax

These images we choose say a lot about us, don't they? Mostly they say things we don't intend.

Funny (and I don't mean this sarcastically but in the spirit of, I hope, mutual amusement)...

...I have been thinking all this time that your avatar was a photo of you...

Though it wasn't posted to me - thank you for telling the story of the woman in your avatar, it was fascinating, and I can see why you'd be worried about her.

a reply to: lostgirl

'the lady doth protest too much, methinks.' -- Hamlet

originally posted by: projectbane
So this is a thread to see for fun what the people of ATS find to be their favorite quotes for whatever reason whether it be for
inspiration, motivation or just because you like it. Please put the quote and author.

I will start:

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet"
-Retiring General 'Mad Dog' James Mattis

"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." - Thomas Paine