Psychoanalytic:
1 – All human beings want magic – Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst
2 – To be an infant is to be psychosomatic – Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst
3 – A person’s most precious possession is their internal harmony
4 – Neurotics are caused pain by their pursuit of pleasure, psychotics are preoccupied with the avoidance
of pain, pleasure is a non sequitur – Wilfred Bion
5 – Pride in one’s achievement under the sway of the life instinct becomes self respect. Pride in one’s
achievement under the sway of the death instinct becomes arrogance – Wilfred Bion
6 – Psychotics, whether out of love or hate, are driven to get inside their objects in order to possess and
control the other. Neurotics are more likely to get inside in order to understand the other person. –
so it is more likely to be reversible – Herbert Rosenfeld
7 – Perhaps the biggest problem in having crazy parents is the difficulty it brings in seeing your own
projections – Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst
8 – Nobody stands in line for the truth.CLM
9 – Children put their parents together in every imaginable way, except the right one – Roger Money-Kyrle
10 – Concern in the outside world is a function of capacity for concern for one’s internal objects – CLM
11 – Infants who suffer early emotional disturbance inhabit their bodies awkwardly – CLM
12 – It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much
for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating
and communicating thought. – Wilfred Bion
13 – Freud acknowledged the baby’s love but Klein recognized the baby’s hate, that threatened people. –
Albert Mason
14 – King Solomon’s Fable differentiates hate linked to love from pure hate (i.e. envious hatred). – Albert Mason
15 – Life is making the best of a bad job – Bion
16 – The absence of a good object is the presence of a bad object that has to be evacuated. –
Albert Mason on Klein
17 – “I had a fractured dislocation”. – self description of an autistic girl to Francis Tustin
18 – Masturbation is OK but you don’t meet any interesting new people – Jaime Genot (sp?)
19 – On Magic: You seem to have found the cure, what’s missing is the illness – attributed to Wilfred Bion
Every Day Life:
1 – Life is hard and then you die – Popular
2 – Life is full of surprises, mostly bad – Wilfred Bion
3 – The road to hell is paved with good intentions – Karl Marx
4 – Luck is the residue of design – Branch Rickey; Chance favors the prepared mind – Louis Pasteur
Luck is When preparation meets opportunity – ?
5 – He who does not study history is doomed to repeat it – George Santayana
6 – Everything you own in life takes up time and space – MMM
7 – Everything in life is a trade-off – CLM
8 – The goal of life is to die young, as late as possible – Ashley Montague
9 – No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public – H. L. Menken
– No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of
great masses of the plain people – H. L. Menken
10 – There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience – John Wooden
11 – Civilized man is an oxymoron – ?
12 – The only thing that will stop falling hair is the floor – Benjamin Franklin
13 – A woman is a path, don’t ask who has walked on it before, just enjoy it – Senegal
14 – Never complain, never explain – Henry Ford II
15 – When I leave here, I’ll wear the same size hat as when I came in – Abraham Lincoln about his
potential election to the presidency
16 – A wagging tail is more sincere than many handshakes
17 – People with humility don’t think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less – NormanVincent Peale
18 – No one can make you feel inferior without your permission – Eleanor Roosevelt
19 – In life, what you resist, persists – Werner Erhard
20 – Life is what happens to you while you’re planning to do something else – John Lennon
21 – To really enjoy the fire try chopping your own wood – ?
22 – Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a gift and not giving it – ?
23 – It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than it is to speak and remove all doubt – ?
24 – I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody – Bill Cosby
25 – Do something. Either lead, follow, or get out of the way – Ted Turner
26 – People quarrel because they don’t know how to argue – ?
27 – Life is like a twenty mule team: unless you’re the lead mule, the scenery is about the same – ?
28 – Of all the animals man is the only one that lies – Mark Twain
29 – Of all the animals man is the only one that blushes… or needs to – Mark Twain
30 – All men make mistakes but married men hear about them a lot sooner – ?
31 – There is nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won’t aggravate – ?
32 – He who loses his head is the last one to miss it – ?
33 – Minds, like parachutes, work only when open – ?
34 – Everyone is entitled to my opinion – ?
35 – I don’t know what apathy is and I don’t care – ?
36 – I sentence you to hang by the neck until you cheer up – ?
37 – Lawyers – the larval form of politicians – ?
38 – Of course you can trust our government! Just ask any Indian – ?
39 – A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water – Eleanor Roosevelt
40 – If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you – Oscar Wilde
41 – Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please – Mark Twain
42 – It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen – Aristotle
43 – It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it – Upton Sinclair
44 – People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than the example of our power – Bill Clinton
45 – You can only be young once, but you can always be immature! – ?
46 – Wisdom = the art of knowing what to overlook – William James
47 – You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose – Nell. Carter
48 – Those that would sacrifice freedom for security will deserve neither and lose both – Ben Franklin
49 – Republicans are selfish to a fault and Democrats are generous to a fault – CLM
50 – Republicans feel a moral correctness that in extreme leads to the end justifies the means – CLM
51 – Democrats feel a social responsibility that in the extreme means being tolerant of almost anything – CLM
52 – Simplicity and plainness are the soul of elegance – ? Dickens
53 – Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity – ?
54 – Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel – Horatio
55 – Art is like sex, it’s no fun if you are just trying to get it finished – ?
56 – It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to – W.C. Fields
57 – No one arrives in Hell surprised – St. Robert Bellarmine
58 – Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts – ?
59 – I make myself rich by making my wants few – Henry David Thoreau
60 – Life is short, read people not books – attributed to Wilfred Bion
61 – You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough – Mae West
62 – Old age ain’t no place for sissies – Bette Davis
63 – It is a happy talent to know how to play – Ralph Waldo Emerson
64 – Happiness is a dry martini and a good woman…or a bad woman – George Burns
65 – You know you’ve reached middle age when all you exercise is caution – ?
66 – Folks who have no vices have no virtues – Abe Lincoln
Work and Success:
1 – I attribute my success in life to the discovery at an early age that I was not God – Oliver Wendell Holmes
2 – Some may see things as they are and ask why? Others dream things that never were and ask why
not? – George Bernard Shaw
3 – Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there – Will Rogers
4 – A man can succeed at almost anything if he has unlimited enthusiasm – Charles M Schwab
5 – Well done is better than well said – Benjamin Franklin
6 – Eighty percent of success is showing up – Woody Allen
7 – When you own your own business you only have to work half a day, you can do anything you want with the other 12 hours – ?
8 – Choose work you love and you will never work a day in your life – Confucius
9 – It is surprising how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit – Abraham Lincoln
10 – Trying is just a noisy way of not doing something – ?
11 – For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clear, and wrong – H. L. Menken
12 – I always behave like a duck – keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath – Lord Barbizon
13 – Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. “Get up early, work late and strike oil.” Joey Adams
14 – The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will – Vince Lombardi
15 – Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all – ?
16 – Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it – ?
17 – Pressure makes coal into diamonds – ?
18 – Winners never quit, quitters never win – Vince Lombardi
19 – If you want to succeed – double your failure rate – IBM pioneer Tom Watson
20 – Creativity is the residue of wasted time – Albert Einstein
Old Fashioned Aphorisms:
1 – The hurrier I do, the behinder I get – Pennsylvania Dutch saying
2 – The early bird catches the worm
3 – A stitch in time saves nine
4 – A penny saved is a penny earned
5 – An apple a day keeps the doctor away
6 – Early to bed, early to rise, keeps a man healthy, wealthy, and wise
7 – Neither a barrower nor a lender be
8 – If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
Religion:
1 – Religion is the opiate of the masses – Karl Marx
2 – Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable – H. L. Menken
3 – The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a disreputable act,
even when it worked and he has not been caught – ?
4 – Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking – H. L. Menken
5 – Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy – H. L. Menken
6 – The great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable – H. L. Menken
7 – There are no atheists in a foxhole – heard from Wilfred Bion
8 – Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think – ?
9 – Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church – ? H. L. Menken
10 – So many Christians, so few lions – ? H. L. Menken
11 – Republicans think everything is made better if you add Jesus and Bacon – Bill Maher
Perverse Quotes:
1 – Talent borrows, genius steals – heard from David Lyon-Buchanan
2 – No good deed shall go unpunished – ?
3 – Of all the escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient – H. L. Menken
4 – When you pick up a stray dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you, that is the principle
difference between a dog and man – Mark Twain
5 – Every dog likes the smell of his own shit – RSM
6 – One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic – Josef Stalin
7 – A translation is like a woman: when it is beautiful, it is not faithful, when it is faithful, it’s not
beautiful – Boudelaire (sp)
8 – I can resist everything except temptation – Oscar Wilde
9 – Common sense = prejudices laid down before the age of 16 – Albert Einstein
10 – If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament – Florence Kennedy
11 – Winston Churchill of George Atwood – He is a modest man who has much to be modest about
12 – I bring you bitter pills in sugar coating, only the sugar coating is dangerous – ?
13 – A stiff prick has no conscience – Don Iovino
14 – Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative – Oscar Wilde
15 – Lack of money is the root of all evil – George Bernard Shaw
16 – Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow – Mark Twain
17 – On Negotiation: You can get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind
word alone – Al Capone
18 – I would kill for a nobel peace prize – Steven Wright
19 – Some people are so far behind in the race they actually think they are leading – ?
20 – Trauma = too much reality – Jim Grotstein
21 – What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? – W. C. Fields
22 – Take my advice, I’m not using it – ?