Truisms Quotations

These quotations contain information that is absolutely, often unabashedly true.

Showing 37 through 72 of 167 quotations in this category.

"Never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

-unknown

"It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm."

-Mary Henle

"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious."

-George Bernard Shaw

"No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself."

-Greville

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

-George Orwell

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."

-Oscar Wilde

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

-Henry Louis Mencken

"When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself."

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety over not to be thought poor."

-Robert Mallett

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

-Lily Tomlin

"Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened."

-Gerald W. Johnston

"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."

-Richard Harkness

"Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like."

-unknown

"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist."

-George Bernard Shaw

"Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools."

-Gene Brown

"The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up."

-Harold R. McAlindon

"A sweater is a garment worn by a child when his mother feels chilly."

-unknown

"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them."

-Anne Landers

"Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time."

-Henry Louis Mencken

"To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense."

-Ayn Rand

"Everybody's a self-made man; but only the successful ones are ever willing to admit it."

-unknown

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

-Mark Twain

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers."

-Robert Heinlein

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."

-Mark Twain

"The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself."

-Thomas Carlyle

"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."

-Mark Twain

"'He means well' is useless unless he does well."

-Plautus

"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."

-Thomas Carruthers

"Only the winners decide what were war crimes."

-Gary Wills

"Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way."

-Lewis Thomas

"He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals."

-Benjamin Franklin

"Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination."

-Christopher Isherwood

"Life is only one damn thing after another."

-Elbert Hubbard

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

-Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel