BartBlog

Plenty of Pith, Punch and Pop for Potted Palookas, Peeved Prognosticators and Potent Portside Political Pundits

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith

“I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.”
– A New York City bunco detective. [And what about the winning lottery numbers?]

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
– Ernest Hemingway [Bush reversed the formula, but it's still true today.]

“Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.”
– Sir Francis Bacon ["Paging Mr. Rove, paging Mr. Rove…"]

“Karl Rove deserves to be remembered as the man who thought Americans should have enough education to understand his fables but not enough to doubt them.”
– Eric Rauchway

“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
– Mark Twain in “Huckleberry Finn.”

“A supporter once called out, ‘Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!’ And Adlai Stevenson answered, ‘That’s not enough. I need a majority.’”
– Scott Simon

“If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
– Aldous Huxley

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin

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