“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” — Napoleon
Quotations
Unquote
“While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he was sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.” — H.G. Wells
Borrowed Trouble
“There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is in your expecting evil before it arrives!” — Seneca
“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” — Thomas Jefferson
“Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.” — Balzac
“Ills that never happened, have chiefly made thee wretched.” — Martin Farquhar Tupper
“I remember the old man who said he had had a great many troubles in his life, but the worst of them never happened.” — James Garfield
“Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.” — James Russell Lowell
“Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” — Theodore N. Vail
Unquote
“If God wants us to do a thing, He should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till He has done this before paying much attention to Him.” — Samuel Butler (from his notebook)
Misc
- Ulysses Grant had a horse named Jeff Davis.
- PORTUGUESE MARINE CORPS is an anagram of SINGAPORE SUPREME COURT.
- 15613 = 1 + 56 – 13
- FOUR + SIX = TEN is the highest sum in English with no repeated letters.
- “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” — William Blake
Unquote
“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.” — Voltaire
Unquote
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
— George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” 1945
“[It is] to be utterly abjected of al noble men in likewise, footballe, wherein is nothinge but beastly furie and extreme violence whereof procedeth hurte and consequently rancour and malice do remaine with them that be wounded wherefore it is to be put in perpetuell silence.”
— Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governour, 1531
“For as concerning football playing, I protest unto you it may rather be called a freendly kinde of fight, then a play or recreation; A bloody and murthering practise, then a felowly sporte or pastime. … and hereof groweth envie, malice, rancour, cholor, hatred, displeasure, enmitie, and what not els: and sometimes fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murther, homicide, and great effusion of blood, as experience dayly teacheth.”
— Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, 1583
Misc
- In 1898 Sam Clemens signed a hotel register “S.L. Clemens. Profession: Mark Twain.”
- Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.
- How many outs are in an inning of baseball? Six.
- Isaac Asimov’s collected papers fill 71 meters of shelf space at Boston University.
- “He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.” — Samuel Butler
After starring as the title character, Anne Shirley, in the 1934 film Anne of Green Gables, actress Dawn O’Day changed her stage name to Anne Shirley and used it for the rest of her career.
Unquote
“I’m not good-looking. … What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there.” — Humphrey Bogart
“If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable, everybody does. You don’t have to act very much.” — Humphrey Bogart
“All I do to look evil is to let my beard grow for two days.” — Humphrey Bogart
Priorities
“Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors until it became so dark that he had to retire to the forest without stopping to pick a pawpaw for supper.” — Adriaan Kortlandt