Quotes & Sayings
12/10/09 Mum's the Word
"Needless to say, it goes without saying."
Now, I suppose I should explain. But if it's needless to say... why bother?
Funny thing is when people use either of these phrases they go ahead at say what goes without saying or is needless to say anyway. Yet nobody gives them any guff for it though it really makes little sense to preface what you're about to say by saying it doesn't need saying.
Perhaps what they're really saying is what they're about to say is obvious, so obvious it shouldn't need saying, but you're so dumb they'll say it because you wouldn't know the obvious if it bit you on the ass. Though I can't say how or if the obvious could actually chomp your buttocks.
If none of this makes sense to you, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm a bit mixed up myself. Which is my feeble segue to a parting quote...
"As confused as an infant in a topless bar."
10/31/09 Less is More
"Can you tone down the subtlety?" — Studio executive to director Harold Ramis.
Now, Hollywood bigwigs have been straining the English language for a long time. Most famously by Samuel Goldwyn who is purported to have uttered the likes of...
"In two words, im possible"
"I had a great idea this morning, but I didn't like it."
"An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
"Gentlemen, listen to me slowly."
"I'm willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong."
"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."
"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive."
Whether he actually said all the things he's supposed to have said is debateable. As Yogi Berra cautioned the public about many quotes attributed to him, "I never said half the things I said."
9/17/09 Election Returns
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
This cynical gem is credited to our favorite curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken. Though writing almost a century ago his observations of political claptrap and folly are just as pertinent, and impertinent today. At least it would seem as he's still being quoted by wags and wonks of every stripe to this day.
Below are a couple more examples. Like some are wont to say, the more things change the more they stay the same.
"Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
9/1/09 Like What You Want
"You can have any color you like. As long as it's black."
This is what Henry Ford said about his offering of the Model T in black and nothing but. Luckily for him, and for customers, people like black. They may prefer red, blue, green, brown or something else but they like black, too. Notice he didn't say you can have any color you want, but any color you like.
One wonders, why did the Model T come only in black. Was Ford arrogant and indifferent to customer demand? Actually, it had to do with Ford's business model and the state of paint technology at the time.
Back then there weren't a lot of specialized automotive paints like today and they didn't bake the paint finish. Black auto paint air-dried more quickly than other colors of the day. On a hot, dry summer day that's no issue. In a Detroit winter, that's another story.
Ford's business model was mass-producing cars at lower costs. Only the black paint available then dried quickly enough to keep assembly lines moving along without huge storage facilities for paint drying. This reduced costs.
So we ask again, was Ford indifferent to customer demand? Not really. When customer demand is for cheap and reliable, variety of color is of less concern. That's what customer preference is about. Prefer cheap, get a Ford. Prefer colorful, buy a Rolls.
7/21/09 Ooops
"You can't be consistent all the time."
I can't attribute this quote. It was overheard by someone in some office somewhere. I think the speaker was explaining some slight mistake seriously and not shooting for humor, irony, or a paradox at all. Which only goes to show sometimes the best laughs are delivered by accident.
Such as in the case I recall from years gone by when someone, also explaining some mistep, mixed "I'm only human" with "Nobody's perfect" and uttered this gem...
"Oh well, nobody's human."
6/30/09 Fool's Gold
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." —Herbert Spencer
If fools don't learn from their mistakes, have you helped or hurt by saving them from themselves time and again. Might it encourage them to ever greater folly? Sometimes it takes tough love to straighten out the misdirected. Or as Shakespeare put it, "you have to be cruel to be kind."
Maybe bailing out failure, overpaying and risky investing might seem to many a necessary evil, but perhaps we'd better not to make a habit of it or... read the quote again. To put it another way, can you say moral hazard?
5/19/09 Say what again, Sam?
People often like to quote, misquote or paraphrase from the movie Casablanca. "Round up the usual suspects." "We'll always have Paris." "This could be the start of a beautiful friendship." "I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here." And of course, "Play it again, Sam."
But my favorite quote comes from Humphrey Bogart's character, Rick, when asked by the young bride-to-be, "What kind of a man is Inspector Renault?"
"He's a man like any other man, only moreso."
I assume this came from one of the Epstein brothers who wrote much of the best dialog for this Warner Brothers classic.
4/17/09 Speaking of Art...
"What you see is what you see." —Robert Rauschenberg
"My motivation is pure. I do it for the money." —Salvador Dali
"Art is what you can get away with." —Andy Warhol
Profound, droll, ironic, silly? I guess that's for you to decide. Whatever you might think of modern art and artists, it could be helpful to keep in mind what Salvador Dali also said,
"I'm a better genius than I am an artist."
3/30/09 We don't have no stinking potholes
"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil." —Sheikh Yamani, Saudi oil minister in the 1970s
On a related note, the horse and buggy didn't vanish because we ran out of horses. If I have my facts right, there are more horses in America today than in 1900. But very few people use them to commute. As big a headache as potholes are, at least we don't have to deal with horse dung all over the street any more.
What will replace oil for energy in the future is anybody's guess. But I'll hazard to predict it won't be horses or burning horse manure. The latter of which would give roadside recycling a whole nother meaning. And a whole nother smell.
On the other hand, kerosine from petroleum replaced something we were running out of. Whale oil and the source of that oil, whales themselves. If you think about it, by making kerosine ten times cheaper than whale oil John D. Rockefeller saved the whale.
3/17/09 Under New Mismanagement
"Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule."
Or so said an unnamed plant manager for Delco Corporation. Yessiree, bob, people say some mighty strange things. This came from a list of real-life Dilbert manager quotes. My dad had another version of this idea when clients seemed obsessed with deadlines above all else:
"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."
The winner of the real-life Dilbert manager quotes comes from Microsoft's Fred Dales:
"As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday, and employees will receive their cards in two weeks."
Makes you wonder if these people have a good grasp of time management. Or of time, period.
3/2/09 Monkeying Around
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." —Robert Wilensky
I suppose I should plead guilty as charged. I confess I'm no Shakespeare. Then again, if you listen to the literary theories of some folks who propose other people actually authored his plays, Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare either. Which only goes to show, monkeys banging on typrewriters mightn't be unique to the internet, they could be writing magazine articles and books, too.
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