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.

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

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.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.

I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple

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.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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.

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.

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.