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Cool Quotes - T
Tact
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Talent
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.
Eric Hoffer
Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What's a Sun-Dial in the Shade!
Author unidentified
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Talk
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
Dame Rose Macaulay
Great talkers, little doers.
Benjamin Franklin
He that speaks much, is much mistaken.
Benjamin Franklin
Talking too much, too soon, and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster.
Meg Greenfield
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.
Doris Grumbach
Taste
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
Taxation
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken
The power to tax involves the power to destroy.
John Marshall
Prosperity of the middling and lower orders depends upon the fortunes and light taxes of the rich.
Andrew Mellon
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.
Will Rogers
If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
The Old Farmer's Almanac
Count the day won when, turning on its axis,
The earth imposes no additional taxes.
Franklin P. Adams
Taxes are going up so fast that the government is likely to price itself right out of the market.
Dan Bennett
I love to go to Washington—if only to be near my money.
Bob Hope
It seems a little silly now, but [the United States of America] was founded as a protest against taxation.
Author unidentified
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin
The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
William Graham Sumner
The tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news.
Dave Camp (Attributed)
When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.
Mark Steyn
Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?
Peg Bracken
Logic and taxation are not always the best of friends.
James C. McReynolds
Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo.
Terry Pratchett
Technology
For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
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.
Author unidentified
Television
I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles
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.
Paul Johnson
Temptation
I can resist everything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde
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 …
C. S. Lewis
Terrorism
Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
Margaret Thatcher
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.
Margaret Thatcher
Thanksgiving
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.
Stephen Furst
Theory
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.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Thinker
Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau
Thinking
Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.
Author unidentified
Thompson, Hunter S.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"
Time
November, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think.
Robert W. Service
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham
Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!
Winston Churchill
Dawn, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Once, adv. Enough.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Twice, adv. Once too often.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Tempus edax rerum.
Time, the devourer of all things.
Ovid
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
Jean de La Bruysre
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
George Carlin
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.
Benjamin Franklin
Dost thou love life?
then do not squander time;
For that's the stuff
life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me …
William Shakespeare
I do love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go past.
Douglas Adams
The trouble with being punctual is that there is no-one there to appreciate it.
Author unidentified
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Tobacco
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.
Robert Burton
Tolerance
I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Toronto
Toronto is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss.
Peter Ustinov
Travel
Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.
Horace
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Joseph Heller
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
J. B. Priestley
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Mark Twain
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.
Mark Twain
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.
Mark Twain
Treason
[Treason], Sire, is a question of date.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand
Tribalism
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.
Bedouin Proverb
Trouble
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
G. K. Chesterton
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it is just possible you haven't grasped the situation.
Jean Kerr
Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
Edward Gibbon
This too shall pass.
Author unidentified
Truce
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.
Edward Gibbon
Truth
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple
Oscar Wilde
Truth And Deception
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.
George Herbert
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle
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.
H. L. Mencken
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain
Hope deceives more men than cunning can.
Marquis Vauvenargues
If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Denis Diderot
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.
Mark Twain
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.
Robert Frost
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
And after all what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.
George Gordon, Lord Byron
A lie is halfway around the world before truth has got its boots on. (Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium)
Virgil
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Adolf Hitler
The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
Mark Twain
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie.
Lenny Bruce
These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people; they call a spade a spade.
Plutarch
[Stanley Baldwin] occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
I was brought up in a clergyman's household so I am a first-class liar.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
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.
Eric Hoffer
Truthful, adj. Dumb and illiterate.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
A woman may tell ninety-nine lies, but the hundredth will betray her.
Haussa Proverb
One lie draws ten after it.
Italian Proverb
Tell a lie and you will hear the truth.
Spanish Proverb
O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken
Truth, n. Something somehow discreditable to someone.
H. L. Mencken
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Mark Twain
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Mark Twain
Truth does not blush. (Veritas non erubescit).
Tertullian
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Lenin
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare
What I tell you three times is true.
Lewis Carroll
Is honesty always the best policy? Not when it does unnecessary harm or gets in the way of doing good.
Dennis Prager
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Saki
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.
Dorothy Parker
Tyranny
They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
Edmund Burke
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Last updated: May 3, 2022