Random Quotes – For Your Musing Or Amusing

November 1999

(On genealogy) One does not have to go back very far to be everyone’s cousin. After the lapse of a mere 20 generations, everyone has 1,048,576 direct ancestors – great, great, great, etc. grandparents. Apart from a few immigrant groups, every Englishman of English grandparents may claim to be descended from everyone who was alive in England at the Norman Conquest (1066). IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY, J. H. Plumb

Actual Classified Ad Blunders (Newsletter of NFO):

For Sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.

We do not tear your clothing by machinery. We do it carefully by hand.

A superb and inexpensive restaurant. Fine foods expertly served by waitresses in appetizing forms.

Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children.

Dinner special – Turkey $2.35; Chicken or beef $2.25; children $2.00

“Rumor is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still discordant wavering multitude,
Can play on it.” (Henry IV, Part 2, Introduction)

(Do you think the “Enquirer” would be willing to run that on their
masthead?)

For fast acting relief try slowing down. Lily Tomlin

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” Albert Camus

If the world’s population of nearly 5 billion people was reduced to a village of 100 people, this would be the result:
58 would be Asian
12 would be African
10 would be Western Europeans
8 would be Latin Americans
5 would be North Americans
1 would be an Australian or a New Zealander

CJW comment: I know it doesn’t add up to 100, I just copied the NFO item. The missing six must be Eastern Europeans.

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” Sir Winston Churchill

“If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as work.” Prince Hal, HENRY IV, Act 1

“A woman came to ask the doctor if a woman should have children after 35. I said 35 children is enough for any woman!” Gracie Allen

“No one, on his deathbed, ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office.’” Vincent Foster (Counsel in the 1st Clinton term)

Problem that has haunted Western thought: “Why would a good God allow evil in the world?... a trilemma created, ‘If God were good,’ observed C. S. Lewis, ‘He would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do as he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness or power or both....’ ‘The only excuse for God,’ said Stendahl, ‘is that he does not exist.’” Daniel Boorstin, THE SEEKERS, p. 13

“There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achieved by others’ death.”
KING JOHN, Act V, Sc. 2

“The artist... speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity of dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” Joseph Conrad, “The Conditions of Art”