(3089/898) Behaving, believing, knowing, saying

906) Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities.

Eleanor Roosevelt (widely attributed)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (5/17/95)

[Note: Sometimes attributed to Hyman Rickover, who quoted it in "The World of the Uneducated" in The Saturday Evening Post (11/28/1959), attributing it to “an unknown sage”. [WQ]]

907) That's why theater's like life, don't you think? No one really says what they mean, but they always mean what they mean.

David Mamet (attributed)

[Note: There is another unattributed Mamet quote which seems at first to be related to this one, but actually says something different.

People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.]

908) One good thing about monomania - it helps to organize your life.

Ed Fitzgerald
(referring to following the O.J. Simpson trial)
personal e-mail to a friend (6/30/95)

909) Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams
"Argument in Defense of the [British] Soldiers
in the Boston Massacre" (12/1770) [B16]

910) When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
Popular Lectures and Addresses (1891-1894) [B16]

911) Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.

Henry Lewis Stimson
(explaining his 1929 decision as Herbert Hoover's
Secretary of State to close down Herbert O. Yardley's
"American Black Chamber" cryptanalytic service)
H.L. Stimson & McGeorge Bundy,
On Active Service in Peace and War (1948)
cited by David Kahn in
The Codebreakers (1967)

912) I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.

Marchel Duchamp
quoted by Harriet & Sidney Janis in
"Marchel Duchamp: Anti-Artist" in
View (3/21/45)
reprinted in Robert Motherwell
Dada Painters and Poets (1951) [CQ]

913) Believing in things is embarrassing. People can see that you're different.

Search & Destroy (film, 1995)
screenplay by Michael Almereyda
based on the play by Howard Korder
spoken by the character "Marie"

[Note: From memory, possibly paraphrased. The line does not appear in the Korder play.]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[IQM] - Internet Quotations mailing list
[WQ] - Wikiquote


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 642 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.