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Robert Ausura Writing Scripts, Speeches & Presentations |
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"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ---" - General John Sedgwick, Union commander. His last words as he wached enemy troops during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." - G. K. Chesterton "Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!" - Frederick Nietzsche "The things that matter don't necessarily make sense." - Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (contributed by Lindsay Edmunds lee@radix.net) "The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it." - John Ruskin "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde "A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines." - Frank Lloyd Wright "Assumptions are the termites of relationships." - Henry Winkler, actor, Emerson College Graduation, 1995 "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Winston Churchill "Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." - Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." - Oscar Wilde "I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets." - Dave Edison "A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer." - Robert Frost "We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities." - Bill Maher, comedian and commentator "I sometimes think that God in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde "There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "Arrows of hate have been shot at me too, but they have never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world with which I have no connection whatsoever." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) "As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports." - Russell Schweickart (on his return from the Apollo 9 mission) "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it." - Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Siddhartha "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "What you hear never sounds half as important as what you overhear." - Anonymous "Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's 'right to know.'" - Kenneth Starr, 1987, Sixty Minutes interview with Diane Sawyer. "I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." - J. Edgar Hoover "I really think that sex always looks kind of funny in a movie." - William Friedkin, motion picture director "Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits." - Mark Twain "Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time." - Mark Twain "Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.... We put off from time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing when we please." - Pliny the Younger (61-105 A.D.) "A traveller at Sparta, standing long upon one leg, said to a Lacedæmonian, 'I do not believe you can do as much.' 'True,' said he, 'but every goose can.'"- Plutarch [46 (?)-120 (?) A.D.] Remarkable Speeches. "Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States." - J. Bartlett Brebner "When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole." - William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) "Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), Irish-born British dramatist and politician "The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February." - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), American critic and naturalist "Russia has two generals in whom she can confide -- Generals Janvier [January] and Fevrier [February]." - Nicholas I (1796-1855), Russian emperor "Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise. - Marcus Aurelius "History is what teaches us to hope" - General Robert E. Lee "No matter what happens, someone will find a way to take it too seriously" - Dave Barry "We're ordinary people trying to do extraordinary things with questionable talent and a limited budget." - Johnny Vega "The best way out is always through." -- Robert Frost "There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings." -- Hodding Carter Jr. "Were it not for the nonconformists, those who refuse to be satisfied to go along with things as they are, the world would have known little progress." -- JosiahWilliam Gift "Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up." -- Jesse Jackson "It is never too late to give up your prejudices." -- Henry David Thoreau "As long as you're going to think, think big." -- Donald Trump "You've got to say, ‘I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough, I can have it.’ It's called perseverance." -- Lee Iacocca "Being considerate of others will take you further in life than any college degree." – Marian Wright Edelman "There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can." -- Henry Ford "Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.". -- John Quincy Adams "Consider the postage stamp, my son. It secures success through its ability to stick to one thing til it gets there." - Josh Billings "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more of it I seem to have." -- Coleman Cox "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." -- Dalai Lama "Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time." – Betty Smith "Wisdom is the daughter of Experience, Truth is only the daughter of Time." – Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) "The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." – Albert Einstein "There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." – Albert Einstein "On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow." – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." – Albert Einstein "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confidentreligions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996) "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power,
but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent,
sees the possible ... what wine is so sparkling, so fragrant, so intoxicating, as
possibility!" – Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) "Jazz is not dead, it just smells
funny." - Frank Zappa "Become who you are." - Nietzsche "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." - Andre Gide "My religion is simple. My religion is kindness." - Dalai Lama "I don't care how much of a lama he is, he still needs his mother." - Maria Torres, whose 10-year-old son is believed by Tibetan monks to be a reincarnated lama, 1995 "Everyone thinks about the parts of his life. No one thinks about the whole." - Seneca "I don't say we all ought to misbehave,
but we ought to look as if we could." -
Orson Welles "Children aren't happy without something to ignore, And that's what parents were created for." - Ogden Nash "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat." - Rebecca West, 1913 "Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease." - Bill Maher, comedian and commentator "My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage." - Peggy Noonan, speech writer for presidents Reagan and Bush, 1996 "Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." - Mark Twain "Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking." - H. L. Mencken "Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." - Oscar Wilde "Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff -- it is a palliative rather than a remedy." - Peter De Vries "The sublime and the
ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One
step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the
sublime again." - Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Age
of Reason, Part ii. "It were not best that we should all
think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horses race." - Mark Twain "Conscience and cowardice are
really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray "Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life." - Bertolt Brecht "I wonder what Adam and Eve think about it by this time." - Marianne Moore ("Marriage") Lady Astor: "If
you were my husband, I'd poison your tea." "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base." - Dave Barry "Sometimes I wonder if men and women
really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and
then." - Katharine Hepburn "A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished." - Zsa Zsa Gabor "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." - Oscar Wilde "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." - Dorothy Parker "Modesty is the art of letting people find out for themselves how important you are." - Anonymous |
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Copyright © 2001 Robert Ausura Last modified: October 26, 2001 |