All Quotes

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
‐‐ Mark Twain

What is the difference between fashion and style? Fashion says, 'Me, too,' and style, 'Only me.'
‐‐ Geraldine Stutz

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
‐‐ Vilhjalmur Stefansson

What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.
‐‐ Stacey D'Erasmo

What is the effect of unlimited coinage of silver in this country? and I invite your attention to this particularly, because it is a question of vital importance.
‐‐ Richard Parks Bland

What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.
‐‐ Timothy Noah

What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from.'
‐‐ Marilyn vos Savant

What is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man.
‐‐ Annie Besant

What is the evolutionary value of blushing? It seems not to be to our advantage to do it, to involuntarily reveal our inner emotions. If we're trying to manipulate or lie, actions in furtherance of individual goals as opposed to the goals of others, blushing would not seem to be helpful. And yet everyone blushes, except the psychopath.
‐‐ Frans de Waal

What is the first thing we did when we took control of Iraq? Protect the oil fields. Remember the administration quote about how the oil would pay for the war.
‐‐ Peter Schuyler

What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.
‐‐ Kate Millett

What is the Geneva Convention on wars! I have never read it.
‐‐ Yoweri Museveni

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
‐‐ Georg C. Lichtenberg

What is the good of experience if you do not reflect?
‐‐ Frederick the Great

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
‐‐ E. M. Forster

What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.
‐‐ Jason Chaffetz

What is the harm of doing the right thing? What is the harm of doing our job as legislators and making sure we do not stick the entire bankruptcy community with these provisions that do not make any sense?
‐‐ Russ Feingold

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see.
‐‐ Louie Schwartzberg

What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation! And unbutton another!
‐‐ Laurence Sterne

What is the luck of the draw that me - me - who finally writes a book, it comes out in the - in the - in the time, in the center of the first pandemic, H1N1? And I'm going out on signings, and I'm going out to the public. This is the one time when I need to be hermetically sealed.
‐‐ Howie Mandel

What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the sufferings and cares of others, to lose sympathy through having too much to think about?
‐‐ Lucy Larcom

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.
‐‐ Samuel Alexander

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
‐‐ Susan Sontag

What is the most common investor mistake? Trading - getting in and getting out at all the wrong times, for all the wrong reasons.
‐‐ Kenneth Fisher

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
‐‐ Arthur Miller

What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.
‐‐ Charles Jencks

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.
‐‐ Eduardo Galeano

What is the motive to the secret ballot? This, and only this: Like other confederates in crime, those who use it are not friends, but enemies; and they are afraid to be known, and to have their individual doings known, even to each other.
‐‐ Lysander Spooner

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.
‐‐ Kate Millett

What is the nature of that place where our original self is one with its longing to explore its own deepest possibilities, and where discovering the treasures waiting there is the same as fulfilling our purpose for being?
‐‐ Guy Finley

What is the 'noble cause' for which you sent our country to war?
‐‐ Cindy Sheehan

What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.
‐‐ Richard Engel

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
‐‐ Richard Wilbur

What is the origin of God?
‐‐ John Clayton

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
‐‐ Allen Tate

What is the point of competing for a trophy if everyone gets a trophy?
‐‐ Glenn Beck

What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
‐‐ Beeban Kidron

What is the point of working all your life and then stopping?
‐‐ Lauren Bacall

What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.
‐‐ Julian Assange

What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?
‐‐ John Millington Synge

What is the price of justice? What is the price of justice? When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor. Not because they're a danger or a flight risk - only because they are poor. They don't have money to get out of jail and they certainly don't have money to flee anywhere.
‐‐ Loretta Lynch

What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If voters care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.
‐‐ Newt Gingrich

What is the purpose of being human and alive without doing new things?
‐‐ John Sulston

What is the purpose of public service? It's to solve problems for the people you represent and certainly in the United States Senate, thinking about your state and thinking about your country as well.
‐‐ Olympia Snowe

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
‐‐ Edward Abbey

'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.
‐‐ Richard Dawkins

What is the quality of your intent?
‐‐ Thurgood Marshall

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.
‐‐ Chuck Palahniuk

What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love, give it the best there is in you, seize your opportunities, and be a member of the team.
‐‐ Benjamin Franklin Fairless