'Oh, see the happy moron' and other quotations

Doubtfully attributed to, but surely not by, Dorothy Parker:

Oh, see the happy moron;

He doesn't give a damn.

I wish I were a moron.

My God, perhaps I am.

Authorship also unclear:

The rain falls on the just

And on the unjust fella,

But more upon the just because

The unjust stole the just's umbrella

1980s Romanian joke

Listener: Is it possible to foretell the future?
Radio Yerevan: Yes. We can predict the future with complete accuracy. It is only the past that keeps changing.

E.B. White

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion."

Hedy Lamarr 

"American men, as a group, seem to be interested in only two things, money and breasts. It seems a very narrow outlook."

Coriolanus:

"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men. "

Brideshead Revisited

 "We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes."

Clarke Kant

The same people that get excited by Mitt Romney also get excited by Argyle socks.

Charles Moore

On Thursday, I listened to the BBC News at seven in the morning after the first of the Obama/Romney US presidential debates three hours earlier. The report of the debate was only the third item on the news. So I knew, without having to hear any more, that Mitt Romney must have won. If Mr Obama had come out on top, the BBC would have led with the story.

 Mark Steyn

"Modern 'liberalism' is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of 'tolerance' are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to 'celebrate diversity' coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity." 

 Thomas Sowell

 "I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."  

Jerzy Kosinski

"I detest the dismissal of the true drama of our life by the emissaries of the popular culture."

The philopsophers 

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. ~ Socrates

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough. ~ Seneca

In order to improve the mind, we ought less learn than to contemplate. ~ Descartes

The superior man makes the difficulty to be overcome his first interest; success only comes later. ~ Confucius

 To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead. Bertrand Russell

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. ~ William James

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. ~ Cicero

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man. Immanuel Kant


What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes. ~ Cicero

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy. Immanuel Kant


I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. ~ Nietzsche


There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of one man should be subject to the will of another. Immanuel Kant

It is good that I did not let myself be influenced. Wittgenstein

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. Bertrand Russell 

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Immanuel Kant

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. ~Bertrand Russell

People are unconsciously aware that the customs of society embody more wisdom than could emerge in a single generation. Roger Scruton

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. Bertrand Russell

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness. Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. — Bertrand Russell. 

Not sure about the last one. Stupid people are more often right than the clever people and do very little harm compared with the philosophers.