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Cool Quotes - O
Oakland
When you get there [Oakland], there isn't any there there.
Gertrude Stein
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there it's there!
Herb Caen
Oath
The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Officer
A General Officer who will invariably assume the responsibility for failure, whether he deserves it or not, and invariably give the credit for success to others, whether they deserve it or not, will achieve outstanding success.
George S. Patton, Jr.
Old Age
I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome
Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
G. Norman Collie
Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.
Geoffrey Fisher
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.
Leon Eldred
A man is only as old as the woman he feels.
Groucho Marx
"Next year? Peter, at my age I don't even buy green bananas."
Arnold Palmer, responding to Peter Jacobsen's request to play in his golf tournament
When death comes near the old find that age is no longer burdensome.
Euripides
When our vices quit us we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
Thomas Jefferson
It is not the end of joy that makes old age so sad, but the end of hope.
Jean Paul Richter
It is the common calamity of old age, to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable.
Edward Gibbon
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
[But] age, the common enemy of mankind, has laid his hand upon you; would that it had fallen upon some other, and that you were still young.
Homer
I am able to say that while I am not ruggedly well, I am not ill enough to excite an undertaker.
Mark Twain
It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.
Mark Twain
… at the wrong end of life …
Alice Munro
All would live long, but none would be old.
Author unidentified
Everybody my age should be issued with a 2 lb fresh salmon. If you see someone young, beautiful and happy, you should slap them as hard as you can with it.
Richard Griffiths
Old age, by blanching the seat of reason, may cut off the fear of death even in a once imaginative mind, or it may, on the other hand, undermine fortitude, softening the will.
Winston Churchill
Onan
Because he spills his seed on the ground.
Dorothy Parker, on why she had named her canary 'Onan'
Opera
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Gioacchino Rossini
No good opera plot can be sensible … People do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
Opinion
He who says what he likes shall hear what he does not like.
English proverb
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
Robert Peel
Too often we … enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy
You've no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself—and how little I deserve it.
W. S. Gilbert
Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Herbert Spencer
Opinions are the cheapest commodities in the world.
Author unidentified
We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain
What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version"—that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization—everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
Roger Kimball
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Bertrand Russell
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
Opportunity
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison
Delay not; swift the flight of fortune's greatest favours.
Seneca
Oppression
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power—power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer
In [Nazi] Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then … they came for me …
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
Martin Niemöller (Attributed)
Optimism And Pessimism
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.
Eric Bentley
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus
There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
Edward Gibbon
What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker, on hearing the doorbell or a ringing telephone
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
George F. Will
Orator
He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.
Winston Churchill, of a fellow Member of Parliament
Oratory
The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
They talk most who have the least to say.
Matthew Prior
The thoughtless are rarely wordless.
Howard W. Newton
Originality
What a good thing Adam had—when he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain
There is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.
Samuel Johnson
My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken
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Last updated: February 25, 2021