Aphorism of the Day

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532, in Work and Recreation

Be good and you will be lonesome.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator, in Happiness and Misery and Vice and Virtue

Once you've accumulated sufficient knowledge to get by, you're too old to remember it.

Unknown, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Vote early and vote often.

Al Capone, in Law and Politics

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.

Bill Vaughan, in Law and Politics and War and Peace

It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.

Ambrose Bierce, in Vice and Virtue

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

Ingrid Bergman, in Happiness and Misery

All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive.

The Earl of Chesterfield, in Life and Death

'Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.

Alexander Pope, (from Golden Treasury of the Familiar), in Wisdom and Ignorance

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Bertrand Russell, in War and Peace