Bill Vaughan Quotations

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

All the aftermath that so frequently follows in the wake of war still confront the nation, and we now, as ever before, must hold fast to the ancient landmarks and see to it that all of these plagues that threaten so mightily shall be rendered harmless.

I believe the world is increasingly in danger of becoming split into groups which cannot communicate with each other, which no longer think of each other as members of the same species.

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.

Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.

I retire to make way for an abler man. In my four years as attorney general I have aged about ten years, but when I have get back to the practice of law, I hope to show those lawyers that I still have some vitality left.

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

Kids don't talk like adults, but kids on the spectrum don't necessarily fall into the same patterns of speaking or have the same interests as other kids their age.

There are two kinds of pedestrians... the quick and the dead.

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

One advantage to having a kid on the spectrum: they tend to be rule followers. Socially, things are harder for them than most kids.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.

Every time you look at a house in Los Angeles, the real-estate agent will tell you that someone famous once lived there. It always seemed irrelevant to me: Does a property gain value just because Alfred Hitchcock used to eat breakfast there?

Hope for the best, survive the worst, find humor wherever you can.

Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.

My son, who's on the spectrum is a very rigid thinker. He needs clear-cut definitions of right and wrong. Anything hazy or gray confuses him. For instance, if I try to get him to see that a friend behaved badly, he'll often get upset with me because a friend is a 'good guy' by definition, in his book.

The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

The wonderful world of home appliances now makes it possible to cook indoors with charcoal and outdoors with gas.

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.

WHATEVER Life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.

In the game of life, it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college.

Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.

Maybe the answer to Selective Service is to start everyone off in the army and draft them for civilian life as needed.

Buried (in the method by which hospitals set fees) is this array of cross-subsidies that lets our health-care system train young doctors, conduct research and care for the uninsured.

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.

It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us.

We hope the trend continues. It's good for consumers.

Our enemy sees us clearly. They will not start a war. They're worried about one thing: If democracy develops here, if we succeed, we will win

Do not ask God the way to heaven; He will show you the hardest way.

The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn't matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.

Muscles come and go; flab lasts.

Work is the means of living, but it is not living.

Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing--that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart--is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.

Do not believe a thing because you read it in a book! Do not believe a thing because another has said it so! Find out the truth for yourself.

It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.

One in whose head is conceit, Think not that he will ever listen to truth.

You cannot speak of the ocean to a frog that lives in a well.

The great soul that sits on the throne of the universe is not, never was, and never will be, in a hurry.

Men are more like the time they live in than they are like their fathers.

Look in the face of the person to whom you are speaking if you wish to know his real sentiments, for he can command his words more easily than his countenance.

As a nation we are dedicated to keeping physically fit - and parking as close to the stadium as possible.

My father asserted that there was no better place to bring up a family than in a rural environment.... There's something about getting up at 5 a.m., feeding the stock and chickens, and milking a couple of cows before breakfast that gives you a lifelong respect for the price of butter and eggs.

All the problems of the world - child labor, corruption - are symptoms of a spiritual disease: lack of compassion.

Nothing is more irritating than not being invited to a party you wouldn''t be seen dead at

IF you torture a single chicken and are caught, you're likely to be arrested. If you scald thousands of chickens alive, you're an industrialist who will be lauded for your acumen.

If CASA?s board, which includes such scientific experts as actress Jamie Lee Curtis, wants to tell the world that drinking is bad for you, that?s their prerogative? But there?s no excuse for political activism masquerading as science.

Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time.

Coal is our most abundant fossil fuel. (GE's) development efforts are to just end up making the plants more competitive on an economic basis by using these other coals.

The cold war was an aberration. Note how quickly the Europeans turned on America once 400 hostile divisions were no longer on their borders.

Any manwhose love of horses isstronger thanhis fear of being an absurdity is all right with me.

Scores are absurdly important, One hundred points could easily make or break a kid.

The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living.

The dogs absolutely do bark and play with each other, even though [Marino] says she trains them not to be noisy. But they're animals; that's what they do.

Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.

Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end. Tho'the way be long let your heart be strong, Keep right on round the bend. Tho' you're tired and weary Still journey on, till you come to your happy abode, Where all you love you've been dreaming of Will be there, at the end of the road.

Representative William McK. Springer, remarks in the House, quoting Henry Clay: As for me, I would rather be right than be President. Reed: Well, the gentleman will never be either.

I got shot in the head by my own guys in my foxhole. And they didn't even give me an honorable death.

KFC is not black owned, but it sure knows to market heavily to African Americans - obviously hoping we won-t care about what they do the underdog, or in this case, the underchicken - So, if KFC wants to take our money and use it to pay for sloppy practices that hurt animals?I say we send them a message that this is not going to happen. I-m calling on people to boycott KFC until they adopt animal welfare systems recommended by PETA and until they stop the worst abuses of the birds they raise for their restaurants.

Open your hands, ye whose hands are full! The world is waiting for you! The whole machinery of the Divine beneficence is clogged by your hard hearts and rigid fingers. Give and spend, and be sure that God will send; for only in giving and spending do you fulfill the object of His sending.

A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.

It is a great deal easier to do that which God gives us to do, no matter how hard it is, than to face the responsibilities of not doing it.

Every man who becomes heartily and understandingly a channel of the Divine beneficence is enriched through every league of his life. Perennial satisfaction springs around and within him with perennial verdure. Flowers of gratitude and gladness bloom all along his pathway, and the melodious gurgle of the blessings be bears is echoed back by the melodious waves of the recipient stream.

The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of nothing attempted, nothing gained and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed.

Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.

Let me look upward into the branches of the flowering oak and know that it grew great and strong because it grew slowly and well.

Not armies, not nations, have advanced the race; but here and there, in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world.

In the midst of life we are in debt.

Walking uplifts the spirit. Breathe out the poisons of tension, stress, and worry; breathe in the power of God. Send forth little silent prayers of goodwill toward those you meet. Walk with a sense of being a part of a vast universe. Consider the thousands of miles of earth beneath your feet; think of the limitless expanse of space above your head. Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.

Let dull critics feed upon the carcases of plays; give me the taste and the dressing.

Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third.

Most new things are not good, and die an early death; but those which push themselves forward and by slow degrees force themselves on the attention of mankind are the unconscious productions of human wisdom, and must have honest consideration, and must not be made the subject of unreasoning prejudice.

Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled if he is not at liberty to publish blasphemy, bawdry, or sedition?; all of which are equally prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well-regulated ones.

The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands.

You only get to keep what you give away.

Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.

Flattery, though a base coin, is the necessary pocket money at court; where, by custom and consent, it has obtained such a currency that it is no longer a fraudulent, but a legal payment.

Winter does adversely affect [the roads] and our roads have been let go, so they're more and more porous. We're going to have to put more and more emphasis on permanent patch and maintenance, so I expect a great deal of roads breaking up in the spring.

The same sun that melts butter hardens clay.

How men hate waiting while their wives shop for clothes and trinkets; how women hate waiting, often for much of their lives, while their husbands shop for fame and glory.

The competition is very stiff. Brian Williams has proved himself as a credible news anchor (at NBC), and Bob Schieffer has done the same (at CBS). But as Peter and Tom (Brokaw) and Dan have always said about the competition, it makes us all better.

Wal-Mart and what Wal-Mart does contrasts sharply with what the Green Party believes.

The voters of Brookhaven Town made a clear choice to turn away from the corruption and problems of the past, .. I will end corruption in Town Hall once and for all. I've been fighting for this all my life.

NATO will not become involved in partitioning that country, .. We're not going to engage in an operation that will fix demarcation lines. This is one country, and it will remain one country.

Uganda's Constitutional Court will decide whether the military court can proceed with this trial. A nation cannot claim to be operating under the rule of law if its military tribunals ignore the orders of civilian courts.