Thomas Jefferson
- A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
- The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Ronald Reagan (1986)
- Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
- Plea to officials: don't just do something, stand there.

Dorothy Parker
- Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

Edward Gibbon
- Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

James Thurber
- Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

Calvin Trillin
- The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

Mr. Burns (Simpsons)
- Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favour?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she’s losing. Well I say, hard cheese.

Lord Kelvin (Brit scientist - 1824-1907)
- Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
- Radio has no future.

H. L. Mencken
- Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Mohandas Gandi (June 22, 1940, on the capitulation of France) 
- Germans of future generations will honour Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more.

Aga Khan (July 25, 1940) 
- The Khedive of Egypt and I will both drink a bottle of champagne when the Führer sleeps in Windsor Castle. Churchill was paid by Jews.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
- I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.