Famous quotes

Trailwatcher/G. George Ostrom

It says in this famous quotes book, "A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip." That type of writing is probably not what a well-balanced person wants to spend a lot of time reading, but then, maybe I've always been slightly off center.

I spent the better part of last week's leisure time reading "Dictionary of Quotations' by Bergen Evans. There are almost 10,000 quotes on hundreds of subjects in 832 pages. The editor notes that many quotes are reworded and changed over the centuries and he says, "Nor are the changes invariably 'mistakes.' Sometimes they are improvements."

Let's take a look:

"Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." (Alexander Pope-1787).

I looked at quotes on "fishing," and found things like this: "Angling: incessant expectation, and perpetual disappointment." (Arthur Young-1787). "I never lost a little fish- yes, I am able to say it always was the biggest fish I caught that got away." (Eugene Field). Then Samuel Johnson observed in 1825, "A fishing-rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other."

We recall Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous inaugural address to the Depression clobbered American citizens in 1933. He said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Did FDR originate those words? Sort of. Philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote, "The thing of which I have most fear is fear," and much later, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journals, "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear." There! See how that works?

Under the heading "Example," I found several quotes reminding me of what I wrote years ago about that being around good friends like Dr. Gordon Edwards and Dan Lundgren. I wrote that being with such men very long made me realize I was not quite as nice a person as I could be. Ben Franklin wrote in his Almanac in 1753, "Setting too good an example is a kind of slander seldom forgiven." Later Mark Twain said, "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." Franklin and Twain must not have been as nice as they could have been.

I just stumbled on the 1988 Harper's Index. Let's review some events of 22 years ago along with my comments at that time:

1. "Iraq has captured 150 Iranian tanks which it then sold back to Iran." No wonder their war goes on and on. I'm sitting here trying to figure out which side is the craziest.

2. "Federal aid paid to Iowa farmers last year was $3,700,000,000." If you have trouble with figures that big, it reads "three billion, seven hundred million." The average state income per person in Iowa is $12,700 and in Montana it is $10,700. We should start not growing corn instead of not growing wheat.

3. "The World Bank's total aid to all African nations last year was $2,937,000,000." The idea here is to teach those starving people to produce as much food as the Iowans got paid $763,000,000 more not to.

4. "The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has issued 51 publications." If you don't understand some of the things done in the name of civil rights, it may be because you didn't read everything carefully.

5. "There are 660,000 pounds of tranquilizers produced in the United States each year." I have it on irrefutable authority that over half of the people who take all those pills have to do so … after reading stuff like this.