Too Difficult

Christianity has not been tried and found false — it’s been tried and found too difficult.
-C.S. Lewis

Manners

Vivian: I don't like your manners.

Marlowe: And I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. I don't mind your ritzing me drinking your lunch out of a bottle. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.

A Carload of Monkeys

They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys.
-Walter Neff, Double Indemnity

Ouch

It’s kind of like being diagnosed with testicular cancer. You hope to live through the treatment, but you don’t look forward to what you’re about to lose.
-A reader of The Corner on Obama's victory

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Helping

Helping an individual is hard. Developing a grandiose plan to save the world is not.
-Rufus T, comment 15 at Dirty Harry's Place

"Warm Body" Democracy

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.
-Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Never Learned Anything

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher

Funny Because It's True

All I want out of life is to be a monkey of moderate intelligence who wears a suit. That's why I've decided to transfer to Business School.
-Guenter the monkey, "Mars University", Futurama

Never Compromise

No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.
-Rorschach, Watchmen