Archive of Quotes
A selection of some of my favourite quotes, collected over the years.
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We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
— Rory Sutherland
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I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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LLMs are like a trained circus bear that can make you porridge in your kitchen. It's a miracle that it's able to do it at all, but watch out because no matter how well they can act like a human on some tasks, they're still a wild animal. They might ransack your kitchen, and they could kill you, accidentally or intentionally!
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People only really learn when they’re surprised. If they’re not surprised, then what you told them just fits in with what they already know. No minds were changed. No new perspective. Just more information.
So my main advice to anyone preparing to give a talk on stage is to cut out everything from your talk that’s not surprising.
– Derek Sivers
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Be patient with yourself, nothing in nature blooms all year.
– Unknown
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“It’s quite humbling the lengths those engineers went to, just so that ordinary road users – men and women that they would never meet – could avoid going into Birmingham. And when I think about that, I actually get quite choked up.”
— Alan Partridge on Spaghetti Junction
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“It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”
— P.G. Wodehouse
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If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
— Eckhart Tolle
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You can’t stop the waves,
but you can learn to surf.§ Noted on
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Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
Carl Sagan
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There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker
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If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronize each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.
Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.
All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the sub-cellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.
We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.
Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment — getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The more practice you give your brain at feeling and expressing gratitude, the more it adapts to this mind-set — you could even think of your brain as having a sort of gratitude “muscle” that can be exercised and strengthened. If this is right, the more of an effort you make to feel gratitude one day, the more the feeling will come to you spontaneously in the future.
It also potentially helps explain another established finding, that gratitude can spiral: The more thankful we feel, the more likely we are to act pro-socially toward others, causing them to feel grateful and setting up a beautiful virtuous cascade.
— Christian Jarrett
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I strongly believe that the amount of love and care you put into a project is always apparent. Even if people are not conscious of it, they can sense when you have paid attention to every little detail.
— Jocelyn K Glei
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In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.
— Seth Godin
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As long as you are tactful, I have found that 95% people are extremely receptive to a clear “no.” Especially if you tell them why.
— Jocelyn K. Glei
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The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.
— Osho
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School comes from Greek, and it’s meaning was “leisure”. I find this highly ironic since so many high-end education systems are focused on ensuring that kids sleep longer and have more fun while learning.
Then you have the word company, meaning a place that you go to work. It comes from old French back around 1100, and it meant a military unit. Then it later became a word for people you spend time with and eat with. And of course companies have officers and secretaries, just like a government or military.
So it’s strange. School is a crappy place to go and learn a bunch of boring things, and its original meaning was leisure. And company is a place to make a living, but it comes from a military unit designed to work together in defeating an enemy.
They make a lot more sense when you think about the original forms.
— Daniel Miessler
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As individuals we think that having lots of cash makes us rich. For companies it’s the opposite. Cash is a liability. If you come across a company that is cash rich and has nothing else, its enterprise value will be zero.
Companies are valued on their future cash flows, meaning their ability to generate cash, not how much they managed to keep. In other words, cash is a measure of past success and investors are interested only in future value. That future value comes from the intelligent allocation of resources toward a valuable goal.
A company rich in cash but poor in vision is likely to be taken private or broken up and shut down. Cash is an IOU to shareholders with a thank-you note for the support through the years.
— Horace Dediu
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Every occurrence that involves multiple people engaging intensely in a short period of time represents a unique ‘Time-compression event’… These are typically highly-focused opportunities for both systematic and serendipitous interaction within self-identified communities. Each event is effectively a dynamically forming, constantly morphing, mesh network of attendees — a powerful way in which to compress the equivalent of human-months’ worth of idea exchanges, relationship developments, and more, into the time & space of (on average) just 2.5 days…. Going to one of these is like tumbling through a wormhole in space-time, being accelerated by a factor of 40x (e.g. 90 days of interactions in 2.5 days), and tumbling back out into normality.
— Ajay Royan, Managing Partner at Mithril
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
— Edith Wharton
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Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.
— Bill Nye
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We get the most out of other people when we believe in them
— Dr Travis Bradberry
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A rolling buffet of distraction
— Des Traynor, on Slack
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When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.
— Ernest Hemingway
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Before you can go to the Bahamas for a week, don’t you first need to learn how to tolerate an entire elevator ride without checking your email?
— Juliet Funt (quoted in article on Slate)
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A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
— John A. Shedd
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Always give 100% at work
12% Monday
23% Tuesday
40% Wednesday
20% Thursday
05% Friday— Chappell Ellison
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Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.
— Harvey Mackay
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Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what you need done and let them surprise you with their results.
— General George Patton
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Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.
— Paul Graham
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Admire those who admire others!
— Simon Sinek
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We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.
— Steve Jobs
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The thing about one drink — a glass of liquor we’re talking about, hopefully a stiff pour — is that it doesn’t involve enough alcohol to make anything stop working. Your eyesight, your natural grace, your moral compass — they’re all left intact. Because one drink doesn’t compromise anything. It enhances. You have one drink and your world becomes slightly better. The bar is a slightly better bar. Your dog is a slightly better dog. Your work is slightly more brilliant. And for that, you pay no price.
— Esquire
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If you’ve done well, it’s your obligation to spend a good portion of your time sending the elevator back down.
— Multiple sources
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It doesn’t matter how amazing the steak is, if it’s served on a cold plate it’s crap. If it’s served with a dull knife it’s crap. If the gravy isn’t piping hot, it’s crap. If you’re eating it on an uncomfortable chair, it’s crap. If it’s served by an ugly waiter who just came in from a cigarette break, it’s crap. Because I care about the steak, I have to care about everything around it.
— Gordon Ramsay, via Intercom
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Texts: Cool! What does it say?
Emails: Oh God… what do they want?
Phone call: I basically assume someone has died.§ Noted on
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Ben & Jerry’s has a flavor graveyard in Vermont where headstones are erected to its retired flavours including short lived flops like Oh Pear and Cool Britannia
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A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
— George Orwell
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One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are focused on the product, that’s not a platitude. When that truly is your reason for coming into the studio, is just to try to make the very best product you can, when that is exclusive of everything else, it’s remarkable how insignificant or unimportant a lot of other stuff becomes. Titles or organizational structures, that’s not the lens through which we see our peers.
— Jony Ive, NYT
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The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.
— Photo, unknown
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Plan in decades. Think in years. Work in months. Live in days.
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I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
— Steve Jobs (via deplorableword)
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I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
— Steve Jobs
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I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
— Steve Jobs (via deplorableword)
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I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
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Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
— Jack Kerouac
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Being a professional is always about taking shortcuts.
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My favourite animal is steak
— Fran Lebowitz
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Most quotes found on the internet are bastardised or attributed to the wrong person entirely
— Abraham Lincoln
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If you come to my brainstorming meeting and say nothing, it would have been better if you hadn’t come at all.
If you go to work and do what you’re told, you’re not being negative, certainly, but the lack of initiative you demonstrate (which, alas, you were trained not to demonstrate) costs us all, because you’re using a slot that could have been filled by someone who would have added more value.
It’s tempting to sit quietly, take notes and comply, rationalizing that at least you’re not doing anything negative. But the opportunity cost your newly lean, highly leveraged organization faces is significant.
Not adding value is the same as taking it away.
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Think Long. Write Short.
— George Lois
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I had no idea Torvill and Dean could walk on dry land
— Bob Mortimer
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My boss told me “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have”
Am now sat in a disciplinary meeting wearing my Batman costume.
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The real tragedy of football is that they would score far more goals if both teams put their differences aside and worked together.
— David Mitchell
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Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.
— F A Porsche
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I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.
— Saul Bass
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Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
— Seth Godin’s hill approach to career development. (via teaim)
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You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do
— Henry Ford (via teaim)
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I just ordered a ladle from amazon.
I looked at a few different ladles.
And started reading ladle reviews.
Actual reviews that real people wrote about ladles.
And thats when I realized the internet really has changed everything.
And then I stopped reading the reviews and just ordered the least expensive ladle.
Because what the hell is wrong with me that I am reading ladle reviews?
— Abtin Forouzandeh via deplorableword
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About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display, and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam.
What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam, whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.
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To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Explanation:
AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20
NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000To make a business, you need to multiply the two.
The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.
I’m not interested until I see their execution.§ Noted on
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke
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In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.
— Gert Dumbar
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Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
— George Bernard Shaw
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A new generation, one that grew up with a data surplus, is coming along. To this cohort, it’s no big deal to miss a tweet or ten, to delete a blog from your reader or to not return a text or even a voice mail. The new standard for a vacation email is, ‘When I get back, I’m going to delete all the email in my box, so if it’s important, please re-send it next week.’ This is what always happens when something goes from scarce to surplus. First we bathe in it, then we waste it.
— Seth Godin
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Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.
— Tim Vine
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No pressure,
no diamonds.— Thomas Carlyle
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the plural of anecdote is not data
— NewStatesman (via @deplorableword)
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If you have a baby and you don’t teach it to say “Help! They’ve turned me into a baby!”, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
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In France, a ‘Jacuzzi’ is the special bath you sit someone in, when you want to hold them accountable for something.
— Gareth Aveyard - @GarethAveyard
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For those of you under the age of 25, a magazine is a blog made out of trees
— How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple Fanboy | Cult of Mac
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I don’t believe in god because I’ve thought about it.
— Sean Lock
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Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
— Chuck Close
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There is a 100/10/1 “rule of thumb” with social services. 1% will create content, 10% will engage with it, and 100% will consume it. If only 10% of your users need to log in because 90% just want to consume, then you’ll end up with the vast majority of your users in the logged out camp. Don’t ignore them, build services for them, and you can slowly but surely lead them to more engagement and potentially some day into the logged in camp.
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Do you know that there are now more people on Facebook than there are in the entire world?
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If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
— http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046
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Be yourself, everyone else is taken.
— Oscar Wilde
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Scientists at first were skeptical that a kitten-type being could exist in the rare Martian atmosphere. As a test, two Earth kittens were put in a chamber that simulated the Martian air. The diary of this experiment is fascinating:
6:00 A.M.: Kittens appear to sleep.
7:02 A.M.: Kitten wakes, darts from one end of cage to another for no apparent reason.7:14 A.M.: Kitten runs up wall of cage, leaps onto other kitten for no apparent reason.
7:22 A.M.: Kitten lies on back and punches other kitten for no apparent reason.
7:30 A.M.: Kitten leaps, stops, darts left, abruptly stops, climbs wall, clings for two seconds, falls on head, darts right for no apparent reason.
7:51 A.M.: Kitten parses first sentence of daily newspaper that is at bottom of chamber.
With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly.
— Steve Martin
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Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
— Spike Milligan
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We confirm that in July 2010 6,400 programmes were streamed from the BBC iPlayer to Android devices…
In July 2010 there were 5,272,464 programmes requested via the BBC iPlayer from Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.
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Subtle design and messaging challenge the user to make her own connections instead of spelling out every detail. Connections we make are more powerful than connections made for us. If Amazon and Zappos had been called “reallybigbookstore.com” and “tonsofshoes.com” it might have made some early investors happy, but they would have built little of value.
Subtle details demonstrate power. Instead of being in an urgent hurry to yell about every feature or benefit, you demonstrate confidence by taking your time and allowing people to explore.
It’s tempting to turn the dial all the way to 11, the make everything just a bit louder. The opposite is precisely what you might need.
— http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/subtlety-deconstructed.html
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I’ve written a one man play called a monologue.
It’s from the Greek. ‘Mono’ meaning 'one’, and 'Logue’ meaning 'Man Play’.
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Tesco’s slogan changed from ‘Every Little Helps’ to 'We control every aspect of your lives'
Marc Watson, Armando Iannuci's Time Trumpet
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Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
— Edwin Land (Inventor of the Polaroid camera)
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[A Robin Reliant] is about as safe as inviting your mum around for an evening on chat roulette
— Jeremy Clarkson
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One of my earliest memories is seeing my mother’s face… through the oven window.
— Milton Jones
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JS: If ‘topkill’, the coolest sounding containment strategy didn’t work, what’d we do?
BP (vox pop): “This operation will involve taking a very clean cut with a diamond saw by the robots … this is being done at 5000ft with the robots”
JS: “We have underwater robots with diamond saws..?! And you went with that sixth? Because the robots with diamond saws - that sounds like the first fucking thing I’d try... ”
JS (mimicing voice): “Yeh, Agent Brown, it looks like filling a pipe there with garbage and mud didn’t work. You know, I was thinking, we’ve got these laser-guided diamond-saw robots, I was thinking maybe we should try those out?”
— Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) on BP’s attempts to stem the leak of oil in the Gulf of Mexico Watch
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Everybody should have a hobby that could kill them.
— Neil Gaimen
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PM: “I know exactly who reads the papers.
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country.
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country.
The Times is read by the people who do actually run the country.
The Daily Mail is run by the wives of the people who run the country.
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country.
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country.
And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”
Sir Humphrey: “Oh and Prime Minister, and what about the people who read The Sun?”
Bernard: “The Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.”
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The President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and … you can drink Coke, too.
A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
— Andy Warhol
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Blame it on the soundtrack, a lo-fi version of Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman, blame it on the ferociously aspirational domestic life depicted, or the misty colour-wash – it’s working. JohnLewis.com has seen a 39.7% leap in sales, despite the advert’s sorry message – ‘You’re going to die, ladies, so buy from us, while you still have breath enough to weep’.
— John Lewis ‘spend it before you die’ ad puts sales up 40% (via nathansmonk)
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These days, several famous names live here, including the television actor Tony Robinson, who so hilariously plays the scruffy, idiot sidekick in Time Team.
— Humphrey Lyttelton (ISIHAC)
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A line is a dot that went for a walk.
— Paul Klee
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The way I saw it, the Pope would essentially be my warm-up act. He’d get them going and then it would be, ‘That’s enough from me – here’s Frank Skinner!’
— Frank Skinner on why he turned down the invitation to do a gig during the Pope’s tour (Skinner shuns the Pope)
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[I’d be interested] if I was some kind of adonis… not like Lord Adonis, who cruelly, is rather an unattractive man.
— Adam Buxton on why we shouldn’t have a ‘Nude Day’
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Your car is so pathetic it couldn’t kill a child.
— Tom Basden, 'Party'
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I never said [Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogain] – I said there was a rumour in Milwaukee that he was - which is true - because I started the rumour in Milwaukee.
— Hunter S. Thompson
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[The BBC] competes with commercial broadcasting in the same way a mountain completes with a road; the mountain was there first, and if the road doesn’t want to route it, it can piss off.
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Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840.
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
— Victor Borge
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… create a garage if you have no immediate need for a forth bedroom, but ensure it’s built in a manner that would allow you to easily convert it into a bedroom, if needed. If the garage has a window, plug sockets, etc, it’s just a case of bricking up the entrance, plastering, and you’re pretty much done. You could turn the garage into a bedroom within a week.
— Do. - Garage or no garage (some sound advice)
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Last time I went to America, I really got into the culture. I went into a shop and the guy said “Have a nice day,” and I didn’t, so I sued him.
— Milton Jones
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You’d much rather believe all that bullshit; … that terrorists are coming to blow up your Ford Focus in particular.
That’s far more palatable for people to buy than accept the reality which is that probably - statistical high, Vegas odds high probability - is that nothing of any significance will ever happen to you in your entire, boring life.
— Doug Stanhope
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The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth, and our job as I see it, is to put it back again.
— Michael Flanders (of Flanders & Swann)
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Imagine something so amazing you can’t comprehend it, and then, make it amazinger.
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I have heard of football, I just wish it would stop.
— David Mitchell
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Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
— Newsweek, Why the internet will fail (from 1995)
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If everyone on a bus agrees that it is a good idea, can a bus go through a drive-through McDonalds?
— Question Asked To Contestants (We Need Answers)
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The report of my death is an exaggeration
— Mark Twain
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A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.
— Spike Milligan (Hitler: My Part In His Downfall)
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If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
— Marcus Brigstocke
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Because nothing says CSS3 like repeating a background declaration 4 frickin’ times
— Jonathan Snook (Twitter)
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Darjelling is a constituency of over a million voters and they are expecting a turn out of 80%.
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More than 700 million voters will vote in over a million polling stations.
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Every voter has to have an election photo identity card, and every name and photo is on the electoral list.
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Although it will take a month for all 700 million voters to cast their vote, they can all be counted in a single day.
— The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (BBC: Indian Hill Railways, Episode 1)
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You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?
— Steven Wright
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One of the first things we say to the client is that it’s not their job to tell us to shift something 10 pixels to left or 10 pixels the right, but that it’s their job to find problems.
— Paul Boag (200th Boagworld Live!)
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Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
— Steve Martin
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The second Transformers movie came out this year. I didn’t fight for a ticket. I’d caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours.
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...And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
— Giles Coren’s very angry letter to Times Subeditors (The Guardian)
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His hair’s definitely whiter than the real thing. Whiter than anything in the universe come to think of it. It’s like nuclear ice. Lower the contrast when the show starts or he’ll cause a hotspot on your plasma screen you could toast a marshmallow on.
— Charlie Brooker on Philip Schofield (Screen Burn, The Guardian)
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Dear Simon,
You are correct and I apologise. Your last project was actually both commercially viable and original. Unfortunately the part that was commercially viable was not original, and the part that was original was not commercially viable.
— David Thorne - “It’s like Twitter, except we charge people”
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Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
— William Morris
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The Foreign Office regards the arrival of each new Minister like an oyster regards the arrival of a grain of sand; the intrusion of an irritant, with a very low statistical probability of a pearl.
— The Great Offices of State (BBC)
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People from Birmingham will proudly tell you that their city has more miles of canal than Venice; which is sort of missing the point really.
— David Mitchell
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Enquiry and inquiry do not mean exactly the same thing… For example, a journalist will ring a PR professional and make an enquiry about a topic. Enquiry is used when asking a question or seeking information.
Inquiry is for official investigations, IE [sic] the senate will hold an inquiry into fuel prices.— WikiAnswers - What is the distinction between inquiry and enquiry
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The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
— Aldous Huxley
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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
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Don’t be so quick to excuse yourself. If 80% of success is just showing up, 90% is showing up early. It’s hard for the client to sympathize with your lateness when she, who had farther to travel, managed to make the meeting on time. No matter how well you tell your story about the newbie cab driver who thought you said 114th Street, the client still sat waiting for you for twenty minutes after denying herself a Starbuck’s so she would be on time. Everyone in the room is a grownup, and, on the surface, your lateness isn’t an issue. But although nothing will be said, somehow the meeting will not turn out as well as expected.
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From my collection of quotes. This quote was first noted on .