Cool Quotes - T

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.

Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What's a Sun-Dial in the Shade!

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Great talkers, little doers.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

Talking too much, too soon, and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster.

Talk uses up ideas … Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

The evil tongue slays three, the slanderer, the slandered, and the listener.

Talkers are no good doers.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.

Prosperity of the middling and lower orders depends upon the fortunes and light taxes of the rich.

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.

If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.

Count the day won when, turning on its axis,
The earth imposes no additional taxes.

Taxes are going up so fast that the government is likely to price itself right out of the market.

I love to go to Washington — if only to be near my money.

It seems a little silly now, but [the United States of America] was founded as a protest against taxation.

The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.

The tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news.

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?

Logic and taxation are not always the best of friends.

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo.

It should be known that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of a dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.

The doctrines that by keeping out foreign goods more wealth, and consequently more employment, will be created at home, are either true or they are not true. We contend that they are not true. We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Taxes are an evil — a necessary evil, but still an evil, and the fewer of them we have the better.

We have pushed taxation of wealth to a point in Great Britain where in many cases the yield would be greater if the rate were less. The idea that prosperity can be wooed by chasing millionaires is one of the most common and most foolish of modern popular delusions.

[I am] a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the morning.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Let not women’s weapons, waterdrops,
Stain my man’s cheeks!

For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.

Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.

I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

Television is bear-led by its visuals, not to speak of the neuroses of the people who work for this irrational and self-corrupting medium. … in wartime, truth is hard to come by but you are more likely to find it in newspapers than in the flickering images and babble of the box.

If everyone agrees that television has unrivaled efficiency at selling goods, services, culture, music, God, politics and fashion, why does the industry continue to claim that the one thing it cannot sell is violence?

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it …

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

God delights in our temptations, and yet hates them; he delights in them when they drive us to prayer; he hates them when they drive us to despair.

I am not over-fond of resisting temptation.

Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Terror has its inspiration, as well as competition.

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists' morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.

Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admiration and an argument for freedom; I know nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.

My favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving … the holiday that is solely based on stuffing your face until you have to be rolled away from the table so you start the exhausting task of sitting in front of the TV watching football all day.

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.

Cuba illustrated the gap between words and reality which was to become the most striking characteristic of the Third World. Everyone in politics talked revolution and practiced graft.

[The term "Third World"] satisfied the human longing for simple moral distinctions. There were "good" nations (the poor ones) and "bad" nations (the rich ones). Nations were rich precisely because they were bad, and poor because they were innocent.

I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself.

Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.

Carlyle’s eye was a terrible organ: he saw everything.

Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.

As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.

The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

November, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.

Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.

Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!

Once, adv. Enough.

Twice, adv. Once too often.

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

Tempus edax rerum.
Time, the devourer of all things.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

Ah simple man!
When a boy two precious jewels were given thee,
Time and good advice;
One thou hast lost, and the other thrown away.

Dost thou love life?
then do not squander time;
For that's the stuff
life is made of.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me …

I do love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go past.

The trouble with being punctual is that there is no-one there to appreciate it.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.

Give me today, and take tomorrow.

The time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.

Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion, and confirms the decisions of nature. (Opinionum commenta delet dies, natura judicia Confirmat.)

He told me … that it was the stated and established method of computing time. It was not, indeed, likely that I should understand him; for I never yet knew time computed in my life, nor can imagine why we should be at so much trouble to count what we cannot keep.

We never consider ourselves as possessed at once of time sufficient for any great design, and therefore indulge ourselves, in fortuitous amusements.

… he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.

What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?
Where's Troy, and where's the Maypole in the Strand?

Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases … but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.

It's not perfect, but to me on balance Right Now is a lot better than the Good Old Days.

I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

I tried so hard, I never knew still waters.

Toronto is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss.

What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

However excellent the verses, it is impossible to translate them from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Doc Daneeka hated to fly. He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Boswell: Is not the Giant's-Causeway worth seeing?
Johnson: Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

Why do people so love to wander? I think the civilized parts of the world will suffice for me in the future.

[Treason], Sire, is a question of date.

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

I against my brother; I and my brother against our cousin; my brother and our cousin against the neighbors; all of us against the strangers.

There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds, than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies …

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it is just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.

This too shall pass.

He that seekes trouble never misses.

When a public quarrel is envenomed by private injuries, a blow that is not mortal or decisive can be productive only of a short truce, which allows the unsuccessful combatant to sharpen his arms for a new encounter.

He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple

It is one of the most fundamental fallacies of the post-Sixties Left that there is no such thing as objective truth.

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy, have ample wages, but truth goes a begging.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.

The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Truth … never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.

Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it; for no species of falsehood is more frequent than flattery, to which the coward is betrayed by fear, the dependant by interest, and the friend by tenderness.

Great is truth, and it prevails. (Magna est veritas, et praevalet.)

One of the favourite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.

Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell the truth.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Hope deceives more men than cunning can.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and … it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

And after all what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

A lie is halfway around the world before truth has got its boots on. (Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium)

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie.

These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people; they call a spade a spade.

[Stanley Baldwin] occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

I was brought up in a clergyman's household so I am a first-class liar.

No totalitarian censor can approach the implacability of the censor who controls the line of communication between the outer world and our consciousness. Nothing is allowed to reach us which might weaken our confidence and lower our morale. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth.

Truthful, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

A woman may tell ninety-nine lies, but the hundredth will betray her.

One lie draws ten after it.

Tell a lie and you will hear the truth.

O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Truth, n. Something somehow discreditable to someone.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

Truth does not blush. (Veritas non erubescit).

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

What I tell you three times is true.

Is honesty always the best policy? Not when it does unnecessary harm or gets in the way of doing good.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

By the time you say you're his,
Shivering and sighing
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.

The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit Tyranny tyranny.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Sic semper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants].

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

All men would be tyrants if they could.